Villalobos Fabric

whatever happens i hope he does do another mix cd - love family trax and taka taka are fantastic.

another dan bell mix would be nice too.

possible translations:

1) missed a deadline

2) fabric didn't want to license something-or-other

hurrah!

http://www.plusorminus.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=532

i google for more information about this every day, but am always disappointed. can it really be out next week?!

The "Minimal Explosion" one? I haven't heard it, but I pissed myself laughing when I saw it.

Does this mean trance is now cool?

I sort of love the cover, with obvious reservations.

Here's the tracklisting for people who don't click the link:

CD1 mixed by Loco Dice:

01. Bucci / Pink Elln - Listen to Eddy
02. Alexander East - Beginning Weekend
03. A. Vivanco - Las Velas No Arden
04. Nima Gorji - Out Of Orbit
05. DJ Red - Rame
06. Reiky - Fucky
07. Bearback - Funky Voodoo Mama
08. Monne Automne - Teco (Pierre Bucci & Pink Elln RMX)
09. Philip Bader - Perry Rhodan
10. Revolver Jesus - Love is not a Ritual (Dave Shokh & Wimpy RMX)
11. LoudE - Futurist (Loudefied Discoblend RMX)
12. Pig & Dan - What comes around
13. Traffic Signs - Infiltrate
14. Loco Dice - Jacuzzi Games
15. Konrad Black & Ghostman - Medusa Smile

CD2 mixed by Ricardo Villalobos:

01. Delano Smith - Detox
02. Kids in the Street - Keep on turning around (Motorcitysoul Original Dub)
03. Roma - Jeckle
04. Kenny Dope Gonzalez - Krafty
05. Sasse - Do Robots Have Soul?
06. Robag Wruhme - WortkaBULAR (Tobi Neumann's ricardosingtvocalpercussionundgretadasalphabet RMX)
07. Donnacha Costello - Bear Bounces Back
08. John Tejada - Infected
09. Luci - My Dry Valentine
10. Guido Schneider - Earth Browser
11. Rob Mellow - Critical (Bunkin' School Dub Mix)
12. Sammy Dee & Guido Schneider - Styleways
13. Digitaline - Rubicube
14. Tim Xavier - Deception de Real
15. Darth Vega - Machinery Mix
16. Woody - Put 'em up
17. Patrik - Dr. Motte's Euphorhythm
18. Mystic Bill - Take Me Back

And the good thing about stuff like e.g. "Mandarine Girl" is that it's neither minimal nor macro, but a weird intersection between the two.

Big anywhere else then??? LMAO!

Actually I reckon a turning point was Mayer's Fabric mix, that was the first vaguely-minimal big release that I noticed all of the dance record stores pushing massively.

But then I think another big factor (as I've suggested in other threads) is people like Mathew Jonson and Dominik Eulberg seemingly winning over a lot of serious techno heads. And now James Holden (plus Sasha/Digweed sets) has offered a way in for prog fans... It's like a vortex sucking in fans and artists from other genres.

Yeah it surprised me too - but what's interesting is how it isn't quite Perlon redux: all the stuff by Eulberg, Trentemoller, Holden etc. has sort of kept the micro but sucked most of the erm deep house out of the Perlon sound, replacing it with something else (prog? techno? IDM? shoegazer? it's all quite open); it's like the difference between 4-to-the-floor UK garage circa '97 and the same thing circa '02.

With Eulberg I think a lot of that slight electro edge is in the toughness to the beats - listen to the remixes of "Mean boy" or "Cosmic Sandwich" and there's a really strident clattery briskness to the drums, very little disco "swing" for all that they're often exquisitely programmed. I think that's a very post-Tiefschwarz thing maybe - the Tiefschwarz remixes often have that same constipated-in-a-good-way feel to them. Maybe that's why I've heard people round here say that Tiefschwarz have a really bashy rock feel to them, not really house at all.

x-post perhaps yeah! I've never tried ketamine.

I also wonder if this is the same mix that was prepared for the Fabric? I haven't heard most of the tracks, so am looking forward to listening.

And yeah - he looks like a Sith Lord in that photo, it's disturbing.

As for this mix:

06. Robag Wruhme - WortkaBULAR (Tobi Neumann's ricardosingtvocalpercussionundgretadasalphabet RMX)

well...

I mean I do think it's really good, in that it's different, but there's a kind of irksome tendency in electrohouse for people to go overboard with the chopping and splicing, which sounds good in actual minimal stuff I think like Jay Haze or Guido Schneider or Bearback but when it's the more techy acid stuff it often just makes me think "yeah get on with it". Basically that they lose the groove in favour of yet another "ooooooah......*three non inter-related snare drums* and that psyche psyche psyche vocal sample from Booka Shade/Wighnomy Brothers muffled pig snort/Horse falling down the stairs"!

Of course the worst culprits for this are all these English guys like Switch etc etc etc, who wants to hear awful UK funky house which sounds like the record deck is vomiting for the duration. It's such a fucking basic caveman level of "innovation" or style, people buying that stuff and thinking "this is fucking crazy!!!". I do worry a bit about that factor with Trentemoller too.

Or if not with him personally, with the glut of really bad minimal which is sure to emerge!

I guess it's not "swing" that's totally absent either, sometimes I think there is just nothing there, as I hinted at above. Cos while Black Strobe or Tiefschwarz certainly don't have any swing to them, they definitely make people want to dance, very easily.

I am not closing the door on minimal or anything, I like lots of it well enough I just wonder about some of the "big" records, they are indeed good, but they are so fucking technical.

Mmm, I reckon that was a sort of turning point for the blogosphere/ whole, well, discours (after all we like to have objects as turning-points...but yeah Jonson and Eulberg coming from that electro-bobbins angle are probably important in that respect. Eulberg is very fast becoming the DJ here.) After Alcachofa Villalobos as a DJ suddenly was everywhere, started word-of-mouth and all of a sudden DJ Rush has become the most requested DJ for big festivals (unthinkable, a couple of years ago.)

Btw. The thing I really dislike for some reason is this holier-than-thou attitude towards Villalobos supposed drugproblem (esp since most of his audience on any given night is fucked-up.) Wonder if this is a difference between an American-European or trainspotter - raver attitude.

he looks like a Sith Lord in that photo, it's disturbing.

That's true though. :)

When I saw him DJ a few weeks ago, you could notice he is searching for connections, played one of those very slow acid tracks from Plastikman's Music, that gorgeous KLF 'What Time Is Love?' ambient mix from '89 or '90? Those were identifiable, at times it sounded like, I dunno, vapourised Kraftwerk or something beyond music almost.

has anyone heard this? i found a 2 min clip on the label's website and it sounded awesome.

Ronan I should direct you to that "Mean Boy" remix as well. I honestly think it's one of the most, perhaps the most compelling groove I've heard all year. And surprisingly simple too.

Tobi Neumann's psyche-minimalism bandwagoneering is really paying off - his remix of 2Raumwohnung's "Meloncholish Schoen" is great too.

It's different to, say, Trentemoller's recent stuff or Robag Wruhme, where the climaxes if they do happen seem almost accidental or unexpected.

um - akufen fans?a

I'm sorry, Ronan, I'm a total sucker for this!

btw that minimal explosion cd was not bad, on mixmag. but i read mixmag, and there wasnt a single word that was of interest. literally. so the cd really cost me £3.85(!). dont think it was worth 3.85.

mixma\g rated the eulberg mix of dj hell number four in this months biggest tunes or som,ething like that.

xp

I wonder if he can beat Derrick May though, the king of trying to get into overbooked flights. ;)

I should clarify my most vehement criticisms above were not for minimal so much as this swisha-house or whatever they're calling all that awful English quasi-breaks.

I do like the horse falling down the stairs noises, sometimes, if you read my post you'll see I was quite careful I think. It's still basically the Pokerflat side of things I have a problem with.

and then you'd huff and puff and say that stuff is just awful, and attracts the worst sort of person, and the most awful form of british clubber, and the parties are just boring and lame, and the CDs are so uninspired and terrible, and it all makes you queasy and break out into a sweat and your hair stand on end because it's so bad.

but you wouldn't tell me WHY i shouldn't like dubsided or classic or MFF better than bpitch or get physical or whatever, only that it's OBVIOUS YOU WOULD BE WRONG IF YOU DID.

I even said I don't even like Akufen but to compare Dubsided to him is ridiculous, I mean that purely sonically, in my opinion, not as a value judgement.

So don't get upset and act like as if people keep putting down Classic/MFF etc, nobody brings them up (or puts them down) in relation to Bpitch or GPM or any other label you might cite that you dislike for whatever reason.

I'm not sure how we're supposed to compare Classic with anyone when it's not even releasing stuff anymore anyway, but FWIW I actually do like Classic (I bought the Ten Years Of Classic LP last week and have a few other releases), I just not on an anti-European tirade for the last 2 months, I can see just as much snobbery from the Classic/MFF crowd anyway, I mean FFS Luke Solomon is the most snobby producer I think I've ever read in interview.

wait who is a snob again?

anyway i prefer classic and MFF because they have better album and sleeve art than your average garishly deconstructed german dance label. because they're not based on some sort of idea of other-ness to justify their cool ("OH I SO WISH I WAS IN BERLIN"). because i like overt r+b and soul and pop references. because i don't think "cheesiness" should be restricted to one or two tracks per compilation.

and also, on a basic level, i prefer the sound of classic and MFF and SWAG (and so on) to your german labels du jour, and think they accomplish the same thing better and more efficiently (maybe perlon is the only one i think is irreplaceable), just as i am sure that ronan prefers his labels to mine, but i see no need to drag in imaginary uninformed consumers and imaginary lame people at imaginary lame parties to prop up my preferences.

sounds good!

Whatever- I heard that Switch track with the "dun-dun-dun" vocals and Morricone style guitars in a club last weekend and it CLEARED the dance floor. Not a bad track, but no dance appeal.

That said, I was kind of shocked that the track made it to LA in the first place, so maybe that says something....

when there is stuff like "mint condition" from modeler's "island life ep" (and you might as well listen to "gett down" and tell me it doesn't have anything to do w/ akufen)

oops. poor grammar habits lead to mistakes....

Modeler = better for the dancefloor

dude i have heard you say the same shit about "controversy" and "billie jean" so i'm taking that statement w/ a grain of salt.

Hey man I never said that about "Controversy"...

But that's neither here nor there for me, isn't otherness a major part of the appeal of plenty of good music?

In any case I think it would only matter if you could somehow prove there was nothing to the music beyond the desire for otherness, which nobody can, seemingly.

And Vahid you've dragged up more imaginary uninformed people than anyone, those blog reading cheese eating KOMPAKT FANS, damn their filthy Europhile hides!!

What I find funny about all this is that I actually play plenty of records which are not minimal, or German, or supertrendy or whatever.

I wouldn't dream of playing an all minimal set at our night, there are plenty fun records I play, Reverso 68, Tomboy, Optimus, Electric Press, Linus Loves, Spirit Catcher, Tiga, Zdar, the Glimmers, Lindstrom, etc etc etc, all the above are also electrohouse or related to me, and these are the artists I suppose I practically choose over MFF or Classic, often, to fill that role in my sets (anyhow aren't these way less serious than Swag or MFF who could never be accused of being "cheesey", as I say, Luke Solomon the most purist "I am the house tradition" snobby interviewee you'll ever read apart from Herbert perhaps)

That's only my personal preference but my point is there is non serious electrohouse by the bucketful that is not David Guetta or Jesse Rose.

And yeah I accept there's some snobbery in my comment about Dubsided, but then it's lessened a bit if you consider my point; that it is ENTIRELY possible to choose "electro" over more traditional or US house styles without being a snob or losing any of the pop, as I say, I think you've a hard job arguing the cause of MFF/Swag/Classic as pop versus the artists I've named, but maybe that's a geography thing.

x-post, and to bring in "gay" into the debate is also a bit ott, what if I told you on the main dance board in Dublin most of the comments about our night (from the guys on the board of THE main Classic/MFF/real house night are like "yeah bring your hairspray" etc etc??

(P)ortugal to
(L)uxembourg to
(U)nited Kingdom to
(R)ome?

http://www.ajpotts.fsnet.co.uk/EuropeMap.jpg

yeah, i came to that conclusion and just downloaded it.

Does anyone have a link to downloading it?

I tried finding it on SSX a few times and have yet to come across it...

want want want!

http://www.plusorminus.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=199&highlight=villalobos

that doesn't do it justice, though. i'm so excited about seeing them again...

In Australia, MFF and Classic have had a much bigger reputation than any of the German labels for a long time, mostly because of a certain communitarian/geographic proximity to the traditional deep house that for so long dominated house clubs: I'd say it's only been in the last 12 months or so that the majority of house DJs have been prepared to take a chance on German labels to the same extent as they previously were prepared to with MFF/Classic/Swag etc/ - and reading a lot of the press prior to that time you would have thought MFF were the only label making interesting unusual house music (not a case of being pro-US so much as just ignoring the continent: Herbert got a lot of props too). The labels themselves were much more open to German stuff - see MFF's long history of having Perlon folks, Steve Bug etc. remix their tracks and vice versa.

Vahid might argue that in this case the DJs were correct before: that the last 12 months has seen clubland become gripped by false consciousness. But I see no more reason for this to be true than for the reverse (we were blinded and now we can see). Surely both positions are false.

Trentemoller's transformation seems to symbolize this whole debate quite neatly: Vahid predominantly reps for early Trentemoller, most people here predominantly rep for recent Trentemoller. I'm not certain why this is necessarily a political choice more than a sonic/stylistic one. And if it is merely the latter, I'm not sure why the preference for late period Trentemoller is obviously and offensively wrong. Of course people's opinions will differ and Vahid is free to like early Trentemoller more, but there is a level of frustration to his interventions that goes beyond merely stating a different opinion.

In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.
And from this groove came the groove of all grooves.
And while one day viciously throwing down on his box, Jack boldy declared,
"Let there be HOUSE!"
and house music was born.
"I am, you see,
I am
the creator, and this is my house!
And, in my house there is ONLY house music.
But, I am not so selfish because once you enter my house it then becomes OUR house and OUR house music!"
And, you see, no one man owns house because house music is a universal language, spoken and understood by all.
You see, house is a feeling that no one can understand really unless you're deep into the vibe of house.
House is an uncontrollable desire to jack your body.
And, as I told you before, this is our house and our house music.
And in every house, you understand, there is a keeper.
And, in this house, the keeper is Jack.
Now some of you who might wonder,
"Who is Jack, and what is it that Jack does?"
Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body!
Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake.
Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly worm.
Jack is the one who learns you how to walk your body.
Jack is the one that can bring nations and nations of all Jackers together under one house.
You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in OUR House.
And this is fresh.

I agree totally Tricky. My favourite thing about "Cosmic Sandwich" is that it reminds me of Metro Area's "Miura". Not because I adore the "Miura", but because of that productive tension.

"i'm tempted to say that the argument is against trendiness and hype, and also against people's willingness to let themselves be lulled by said trendiness and hype."

I can see this, but Vahid clearly reps for a lot of music that was subject to trendiness and hype before. And dance music is so fragmented and democratic these days that basically everything is hyped by different audiences (even Switch). Which means that the debate between Ronan and Vahid becomes a debate between whose audience-strawman is worse, boneheaded mixmag-reading uk club types or smarmy otherness-worshipping Kompakt-repping net geeks.

"boneheaded mixmag-reading uk club types" are as likely to be d&b fans or trance fans or psychedelic minimal german techno fans as they are Switch fans, and Mixmag is right more often than even I am usually prepared to give it credit for.

"smarmy otherness-worshipping Kompakt-repping net geeks" did used to exist, I think. Up until '03 I had more luck finding Kompakt cds in geek-music record stores (Melbourne' Synthaesia, beloved of Jon Dale, is a good example) than in dance music stores. This switched quite suddenly in '03 and now Kompakt are always stocked in Rhythm & Soul and never stocked in Synthaesia. The people into Kompakt these days were the people into straightahead techno and house at the beginning of the decade.

"am i the only one who finds it amazing that ronan has been shifted into the "Repping for Kompakt" hotseat? "

x-post Yes this is precisely my point!

xpost, i love the term imaginary dance music, it's brilliant!

x-post 1999 wasn't it?

Yeah, I totally noticed the change. All of a sudden, progressive-heads were into it. Even some of my D&B friends.

Interestingly, it was the first few tracks that seemed to make an impression on the new fans (and myself, to a certain extent) - "Think about You" -> "Old School, Baby", before the minimal excursions that followed. This was the first time I heard that kind of macro-house sound that has become so common in certain tiers of electrohouse: super-detailed, big-room tracks.

I can see this, but Vahid clearly reps for a lot of music that was subject to trendiness and hype before.

first, i think i must have missed the month when classic/MFF blew up the blogosphere. as i remember it all ran sort of basic channel --> herbert --> isolee --> force inc --> kompakt ... and completely skipped over all of the west coast / deep house i find so thrilling. (fine i admit, i am just being an obnoxious overzealous independent street-teamer for the artists i really really like)

2nd, i have a personal agenda, which is to reconcile the dialectics of dance music i learned in my early-mid-90s reading (forward-experimentation is all good but you need some street-level vibes, too, to keep the balance - ie the reason we prefer (early) reinforced to (early) photek or (early) j majik) w/ my love of techno, house, and disco ... where this reigning impulse sort of got flipped ... ie the grimists and junglists who pooh-poohed on squarepusher were suddenly all "fuck this deep house shit, have you heard HYPERCITY?"

3rd, i am not just pushing some lame anti-continental europe agenda. if you want my idea of a near-perfect label to put up there w/ (or even above) ferox and classic: PLAYHOUSE.

As a result I think it's more useful though to look at this in the broader context of the dance media where Classic have always been repped for due to Derrick Carter's popularity as a DJ.

If we are must talk about this in blogsphere terms, I think it's legitimate to use myself as an example: I've really liked MFF and Classic since I first started investigating contemporary US house in about 2000 and in fact have been unable to resist playing "Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?" almost every time I've ever DJ'd. I know Matos for one also reps for Freaks. I didn't discover Swag until 2003 but have loved them since then; particularly adore their remix of Metro Area's "Pina". My favourite album of last year was a San Francisco house album, and I also adored the MFF mix that I know you also like.

As for the dialectics thing, I take your point, but deep house - from Glasgow Underground to Naked Music - never struck me as having any more of a "street level vibes" quotient than most of the German stuff. Definitely more than Mille Plateaux I'll grant you, but when you're talking about Pokerflat or Get Physical it's all a much of a muchness. And while there are certainly many people who loved German house when it = Mille Plateaux, as I was saying upthread I don't think those people are really the same group of people who are repping for Eulberg or Trentemoller now. (BTW, you didn't answer my response to you re Basteroid on the other thread so I'm going to be pouty w/r/t dance music dialectics).

Anyway, in terms of trend and hype I understand being frustrated that certain sounds are dismissed or not paid enough attention to, but I think we have to distinguish this from the frustration of people liking shit music. It's hard I'll admit: It pisses me off when I see people shout hosannas over El-B and Steve Gurley when it comes to 2-step garage and ignore or sneer at Bump & Flex or Dubaholics, and I have to remind myself that El-B and Steve Gurley really were geniuses as well.

OTM and to take this one step further, I think the opposite might be true. Where I live, deep house or the west coast sound has been reduced to sonic wallpaper at sushi restaurants, trendy bars and retailers. Sure you'll find a lot of DJ's here playing and producing it, but forget about finding anyone outside the tiny "scene" engaging with the music on any level other than background noise.

Meanwhile, the local indie/electro/eclectic/rock promoters who can draw 400 strong crowds on a Wednesday with local talent are starting to book acts like Tiefschwarz. And these kids come out to *dance*.

(if we're talking street cred we might as well ditch this entire genre and talk about hiphop which let's face it owns house entirely in that respect)

I'm not sure about your antipathy towards blogs Vahid, I mean so what if something wasn't covered on the blogs, you have to remember also that at the time of Classic's dominance blogs were a bit less established anyhow. And there are loads of things that don't get coverage on blogs which I really like, but so what, I don't consider whether stuff gets coverage or not to be a dividing line of quality, but maybe I'm not as suspicious of blogs as you, I don't know.

I don't even think Get Physical has got huge hype on blogs, Geeta mentioned it, Simon mentioned Body Language once, and I probably mentioned it a whole load of times (in the 10 blog posts I've ever done).

I don't know, part of me still feels why the hell should anyone have to listen to anything? I mean are the bloggers praising Kompakt or whatever being disingenuous or false? I don't think so! So I don't see what the problem is.

And yeah I'm a bit bemused to be suddenly defending Kompakt and stuff, not least when I consider that I started off on this thread criticising some of the hallowed Germans. mostly I fit minimal stuff into what I was originally into anyway (happening more and more lately, with lots of peoples sets, Damien Lazarus is a very good example of this with a nice timeline), though I do often buy records I can't play just if I like them.

I guess I would also add, in, hopefully polite, response to Vahid, that

1. People writing blogs often need to hear CDs before they write about something and electrohouse has had so many high profile CDs.
2. It's actually quite hard, as I'm sure you know, to write about something which might be a really good dance label, when it has little or no image. I would say this is true of GPM and plenty of other labels.
3. Surely the difference between Squarepusher versus grime/jungle and Hypercity versus "deep house" is that the racial divide is nowhere near as marked. Can Swag really claim to be any more authentic than DJ T? If so how? Just by sonics? Seems a tricky area. If this was 1991 maybe, but white people have been making house music for years.

Of course, it's not just class - Reynolds doesn't defend hard house and he didn't defend handbag house back in the day (I love Tom's review of JX in his 100 singles of the 90s collection which discusses this). What's necessary as a further component is some sort of autocatalytic sonic transformation.

Of course the other difference w/r/t Squarepusher was that he was making drum & bass radically less danceable, and he was also very much operating as a lone auteur, marking out his stylistic territory quite distinctly. Hypercity may not be as peaktime as a Euphoric Disco House Anthems mix, but I think its danceability is actually on a par with most deep house or the swirlier side of prog - when I fist heard it, the two reference points that sprung to my mind were the Andy Weatherall disc of Live at the Social Volume 3 and, natch, Sasha & Digweed.

It's quite a functional mix, designed for the dancefloor - everytime I listen to it I'm surprised at how loud and consistent the kick drums are, how brisk the grooves feel on the best tracks (mostly supplied by M.R.I.). And, of course, everything about the music in terms of mechanics of production (emphasis on 12 inch medium, mixing, faceless artists etc.) resembles dance music proper rather than some home listening mutation of it.

I think what's interesting Vahid is that you've sort of reinterpreted Simon's approach to emphasise the mechanics of reception: if I remember correctly your discussion of "Imaginary Dance Music" emphasises the anti-danceness of isolated music writers downloading and discussing tracks over the net, divorced from the context of the dancefloor - allowing for the hypothesization of an idealised dance music which has nothing to do with actual physical dancing. I might venture to propose that the music you talk up a lot is the stuff which most people find difficult to idealise, difficult to discuss, because a non-idealised experience of dance music might (according to one interpretation) offer a more immediate, less mediated experience of some kernel of physical realness in dance music.

(this is not the same as dancefloor vs non-dancefloor; 'ardkore is very dancefloor but also easy to idealise, if only because Simon R has shown us how... whereas probably the hardest stuff to idealise is all the at-first-glance anonymous, DJ toolsy stuff one finds in, surprise surprise, old fashioned tech-house, west coast house etc. etc. etc.)

Reynolds' take is all about "shock of the new" and raw, crude, sonically surprising music bubbling up from street level. Basically it's picking out the two critical factors as being 1) progression and 2) some sort of street level 'authenticity'.

The german sound, and the reasons people like it is clearly linked to the first of these. It's the newest sound out there. Even if deep house wasn't at least 10 years old in its current incarnation, it would still be deeply wedded to an overtly retro sound.

However what deep (as a shorthand for classic etc.) house can still do is be surprisingly effective on a dancefloor. Despite the fact it is omnipresent in shit bars and chain restaurants (in Asia and Europe anyhow). This effectiveness, which Tim is talking about above, I'd put down to an element of 'craft' in the way its put together. If you're not looking to be smacked in the face with pure novelty and excitement with every tune, but want a good groove, it can be fantastic.

http://82.66.50.71/audiofamilies/ficheDL.php?reference=7

Tracklist:

00:00 [a]pendics.shuffle - saw saw soup (robag wruhme mix) - www.orac.vu
03:19 dog vs. dog - keep us away - www.lebensfreuderecords.de
06:34 nathan fake - dinamo (dominik eulberg remix) - www.traumschallplatten.de
10:19 extrawelt - soopertrack - www.bordercommunity.com
12:58 ziggy kinder - viel bass & wenig hund - www.ware-net.de
17:40 frankie - storm - www.frankie-rec.com
20:13 phonique - weapon - www.dessous-recordings.com
23:15 john tejada - voyager - www.paletterecordings.com
29:13 traffic signs - infiltrate - traffic signs
33:02 dj t. - a guy called jack (joakim remix) - www.physical-music.com
35:11 stop disco mafia - bodies (krikor's sweat pony remix) - www.proptronix.com
37:51 dan curtin - conduit - www.tuningspork.com
41:17 mathias kaden - circle pit - www.vakant.net
42:49 dominik eulberg - die invasion der taschenkrebse (justin maxwell remix) - www.traumschallplatten.de
48:10 fark - steffi - www.contexterrior.com
50:11 daniel bell - superminimal - www.logisticrecords.com
53:07 s-max - buddhanath mindful dub - www.telegraph-records.com
55:39 john tejada - mono on mono - www.paletterecordings.com

The argument: these things are not mututally exclusive. On the weekend DJ Heather in Tokyo was all tried-and-true American house and getting the crowd moving, but then moving into electro/tech stuff and the party people were fine with it, 100% into even.

On a musicological level, it's the same kinda drums and percussion, what's different is the treble: sampled records/real instruments vs. analog synths. Which is an academic distinction to most, y'now?

what's bothersome is when the electro-house sound becomes unescapable. variety is the spice of life and all that.

tricky, your mixes demonstrate the point this very well. Pretty Vacant is fantastic!

I joined here recently and despite probably being what I discover is a "Dissensus/blogosphere type (ah bon ?) who may have checked for microhouse circa 2001" I must say the words "deep house" have been quite recklessy thrown around in this thread and elsewhere on ILM. No wonder I don't see a lot of house posts and discussions here !

As Jacob rightfully pointed out it is highly effective on the dancefloor - but nobody wants to discuss how interesting it is that it works differently than micromacroelectrotechnohouse. Dammit, who here among the Deutsch-friendly cognoscenti has felt the house vibe, the one that still gets made and ignored in America, where a lot of you are posting from. A lot of these people are black and gay, but I'm not going there.

Deep house, for lack of a better concept is not from Glasgow Underground to Naked Music. It has uninterruptedly evolved since disco and that stylistic axis / slice of time doesn't represent much in the big picture. More like, from Larry Heard to Antonio Ocasio (to name a personal fave).

On a musicological level, it's the same kinda drums and percussion, what's different is the treble: sampled records/real instruments vs. analog synths. Which is an academic distinction to most, y'now?
-- Good Dog

Real instruments make the distinction anything but academic on recordings and dancefloors. Incidentally this is where it's been at since a few years, so I don't even need to check for eurogoamicrohouse at all although I do get to hear most of it in the end anyway.

their label roster has induceve (who are classic recording artists), switch (who record on freerange, a tech-house label), jesse rose (who is a favorite of breakbeat stalwarts like, uh, derrick carter and funk'd'void) ... if you want a good summary of dubsided recording artists you could check out "slip'n'slide present straight jacking" ...

also i've never seen a dubsided artist on a meat katie / freestylers / stanton warriors / plump djs playlist.

so WTF are you on about?

Ignored by who? House (deep/funky/undergound/whatever) has been *the* predominant staple of the underground for years in my town and even more so in other Texas cities like Dallas or Austin. Ignored by the mainstream, sure, but no more so than any form of dance music other than hip hop.

Deep house, for lack of a better concept is not from Glasgow Underground to Naked Music. It has uninterruptedly evolved since disco and that stylistic axis / slice of time doesn't represent much in the big picture. More like, from Larry Heard to Antonio Ocasio (to name a personal fave).

This distinction is lost on everyone except the most die-hard house purists. Whether it's an accurate use of the word or not, the term "deep" has become synonymous with a much broader spectrum of House than what you're describing here.

Real instruments make the distinction anything but academic on recordings and dancefloors. Incidentally this is where it's been at since a few years, so I don't even need to check for eurogoamicrohouse at all although I do get to hear most of it in the end anyway.

http://www.deephousepage.com/

I referred to Glasgow Underground and Naked Music because these were by far the highest profile labels self-identifying as deep house at the beginning of the decade - at least around my parts they were.

Where do you stand on Dessous exactly Vahid?

glasgow underground = force tracks (two labels based around huge glowing clouds and squiggles of synth pads, divided by degree allegiance of allegiance to swing and glide: w/ force tracks, the swing is always threatening to overtake the glide and on GU the glide sometimes irons out almost all the swing)

naked music = pokerflat (sleek and vapid generic moodfood)

(from way upthread)

Jack is the one who gives you the power to jack your body!
Jack is the one who gives you the power to do the snake.
Jack is the one who gives you the key to the wiggly worm.
Jack is the one who learns you how to walk your body.
Jack is the one that can bring nations and nations of all Jackers together under one house.
You may be black, you may be white; you may be Jew or Gentile. It don't make a difference in OUR House.
And this is fresh.

...as far as i can tell, there is no song called "jack's house", but that's a moot point. i'm looking for the track that has this vocal, but set over a heavy breakbeat or beat-heavy club-house groove from the mid-90s. it was on a mixtape from DJ taylor, which is long gone at this point. any clues? much appreciated. this is the one track i've been searching for a very long time. same tape also featured this track:

http://s31.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=20Y24T6KIXWOI2LGXXXPYZBHGR

Crystal Method - Now Is The Time (ICloud Mix)

Is this an unequivocal putdown? It seems like an odd criticism to make in the context of a defence of deep house.

(It's also only correct for 27% of Pokerflat's output)

That's funny Vahid- I was going to say something similar upthread about Playhouse....

Ignored by who
by and large, by ILM. Which was the real subject of my post I think.

From artist A to artist Z : well I shouldn't have played a game I didn't start. But calling Larry Heard a Dessous recording artist is like calling Marshall Jefferson an Airtight recording artist. Euro labels buy a little piece of US house history a dickade and a half after it happened, to raise awareness... about themselves. If they collaborated successfully with artists beyond a release or two, sure, but they don't. Much more interesting and valid in my opinion is DJ Hell's respectful re-releasing of Bobby Konders material.

Ignored by the mainstream, sure, but no more so than any form of dance music
What ? You keed, you keed. I have one word for you : Tiesto. Yeah there's a fancy accent somewhere in that Godforsaken name, who cares.

And Deephousepage, sure I'm a member but I don't post much there. See this is why I used something corny like a "vibe" in an argumentative discussion upthread. Deep house heads tend to be all spiritual and oppressingly family-like so the music doesn't get picked apart as interestingly as it can be on this here forum.

I don't have an ultra-hardline def of deep house. I just feel it's under- and mis-represented here a lot of the time. Like that "swing and glide" analysis, which strikes me as a very techno way of listening, if anyone knows what I mean.

With music, you always have to go find diamonds in the rough, and while house probably has a greater "rough" ratio than other genres, it's primarily due to not being able to easily identify releases as such.

With rock music, you only have to read as far as "This Orange County punk band..." before dismissing. Not so easy with a white label 12"...

thanks so much, jacob! that's exactly what i was looking for. come to discover that the taylor mix is actually a published CD and not a mixtape...my dreams have been fulfilled!

best line ever.

-- Tim Finney (tfinne...), October 6th, 2005 6:25 AM. (Tim Finney)

no, it's NOT an unequivocal putdown! it's defn a value judgement, in that i'd only be a bit disappointed if naked music closed up shop tomorrow, but i'd be crushed if trackmode or OM closed up.

anyway i agree about pokerflat and dessous - i think a lot of their stuff is as boringly tolerable as naked music's output. i'm w/ ronan in that i'm not sure why people around here are so willing to talk about pokerflat (must have to do w/ the label's distribution and how easy it is to get ahold of their vinyl) ...

oddly, i think they have their one-off moments (jackmate, robotman, glowing glisses) but i find the label stalwarts pretty boring (hakan lidbo, steve bug, martini bros, landsky)

i like dessous better because i think vincenzo is great! but dessous-discussion sometimes makes me annoyed because i feel like they get a free pass from people who wd sniff at labels like glasgow underground and nite grooves - somehow the assn w/ steve bug "dignifies" the label ... and it's not such a big divide when you are looking at people like ADNY and whatever (i really like ADNY!)

-- jsoulja (jsajd...), October 6th, 2005 6:47 AM. (jsoulja)

weird, because playhouse has put out some of the most lopsided and ill-fitting records in the whole "minimal" movement ... things like isolee's albums, losoul's 1st album, benny blanko compilation, the blaze reissues, rework, "alcachofa" etc ... an almost uninterrupted string of stuff which has been copied since but at the time was epochal ... compared to kompakt, who do one epochal track and then mine the same rut/groove for 10-15 straight releases.

anyway playhouse have the most liberal stylistic net of the big "minimal" labels - this raises my esteem for them quite a bit, too. if some of it is "vapid" (john tejada? captain comatose?) (i think very little of it is "sleek" in the same way as pokerflat or naked ... maybe the early roman flugel projects?)

Plus all those Famous When Dead's have great tracks, and then some total zzzzzzzzzz's.........

I think this is correct.

I like a lot of Glasgow Underground stuff but I'm not sure if there was any further it could go - but this might be a failing of my imagination rather than that of the artists. The last release I unequivocally loved (and in this case REALLY REALLY REALLY loved) was Powder Productions' "Skyline". Paper/Repap had a lot more promise for the future but that promise was mostly picked up and improved upon by the Classic/MFF/Playhouse intersection.

I think I'm probably the only person who really checks for Poker Flat in any major way round these parts, and then mostly on the basis of their Volume 2 and Volume 3 comps. Martini Bros are boring now but were awesome circa 2002, esp. live. I just listed my favourite PF tracks in the electro-house bobbins thread.

I'm inclined to add that every Kompakt release forward can be traced directly back to "Immer", as I was listening to it yesterday for the first time in quite a while, and I think the only recent releases I couldn't find in it were Rex The Dog, and maybe DJ Koze....

....and "Happiness" is just sticking out like a sore thumb- it's kind of embarrassing. I still love Kompakt, but it brings to mind a line in a Mogwai review I read a few years back: "Would someone PLEASE throw these guys a new hook?!"

... and Triola Im Remixraum and Dirk Leyers Wellen EP and Justus Köhncke Elan / Taste and Superpitcher Happiness and Magnet Rising Sun and Ferenc Yes Sir, I Can Hardcore and Superpitcher Yesterday .... and .... and ...

....and I'm the last one to go picking on Kompakt, but truth is truth. Do I see a wide range of diversity in their catalog? Yes, but I am also obsessed with the label, obsessed enough that I can also easily find the constant recycling. Does it ALWAYS happen? No. Regularly? Yep.

And on that note- I'm taking back what I said about the Kohncke. Go listen to "Krieg" and tell me that guy's not recycling some hooks. Also, "Timecode" to thread, etc.

Full disclosure is warranted here: I used to buy my Kompakt CDs at the store I'm talking about here, so i'm something of a smarmy otherness-worshipping Kompakt-repping net geek myself. But then, maybe i'm also a bit of a boneheaded mixmag-reading (australian) club type. Is it possible to be both?

A: there is no scene, just a trend

This is an interesting distinction, ignoring for a moment the generally perjorative connotations of "trend." What would a proper scene look like? And in the age of blogs/filesharing/etc how long do self-contained "scenes" actually last? Grime may have started out as a scene, and certainly there must still be a scene there in certain parts of London, but for most of the world (the few people paying attention, that is), it's a trend. When did house move from being a scene to a trend? When it moved out of Chicago? Was deep house ever a scene? Can scenes co-exist with trends? I would suspect that for certain people in certain communities in Berlin, this psychedelicky house thing (which I am going to start calling "Dramaminimal," not referencing drama but rather the seasick medication Dramamine - well, at least until Pfizer sends me a cease and desist) is a sound that has risen from a scene. Said scene does not necessarily exclude other sounds, though - when I saw Villalobos at the Sunday afternoon afterparty Beat Street a little under a year ago, for example, his set was really more deep house than anything else; very few micro- signifiers in the house, no pun intended.

I wonder what happened folks (warning, shortcuts ahead). Sometime around the turn of the century we all got drowned in BeyerBeats and people quit using "techno" alone to describe the music. Detroit's "minimal" strand (esp. Hood) gets recuperated by Europeans, fucked up somewhat, stamped "HOUSE" something or other and sent right back to the US. And then we call deep house something that is just today's techno, to which we can keep adding adjectives like we always did.

Deep house is alive and (not so) well, why validate a domain-name squat like this ?

that is the dumbest thing i've heard all morning, and i've been up for almost two hours.

Am I ahead now, vahid?

seriously, that is up there w/ people who say "adam beyer + deetron + the other scandinavians don't understand real techno, they just use kevin saunderson and octave one records once in a while to look cool"

enough with the ad hominem attacks

enough with the ad hominem attacks
I did warn about shortcuts but yeah..

sad to say, of all you said, little of it made any impression on me - maybe i am dense?

why not?

either as a tribute (to what are everyone's roots I would argue)

um ... so what about people w/ roots in new wave, roots in industrial music, roots in rave music, roots in r+b (not garage), roots in "new" music, roots in electro, etc etc

And then we call deep house something that is just today's techno, to which we can keep adding adjectives like we always did.

seriously, we should stop using adjectives. because they only help us understand what set of records we are talking about annoy blunt1200.

also you have it BACKWARDS. we call "today's techno" "deep house", not the other way around ... except we haven't, because i'm not including vitalic or mylo in this - don't they have a better claim to being today's techno? how about all the scandinavians who are still pumping out the techno? nobody is calling dominik eulberg or hell or holden or alter ego "deep house" yet ... because they're not going there, and the "there" was getting increasingly close to trackmode for a while (are you happy? i am talking about larry heard now ... i am now getting back the bad-karma i got for baiting ronan, in the form of someone telling ME i need to have more respect for larry heard! ps - i am the original deep house big internets schlong around here so fuck off)

But calling Larry Heard a Dessous recording artist is like calling Marshall Jefferson an Airtight recording artist. Euro labels buy a little piece of US house history a dickade and a half after it happened, to raise awareness... about themselves

don't forget the other 1/2 of the equation - or go read some mark sinker threads if you need to - the other 1/2 is that larry heard and marshall jefferson sell themselves to euro labels. why?? YOU GUESSED IT - "to raise awareness ... about themselves"! and to buy a little piece of current label cachet.

I just feel it's under- and mis-represented here a lot of the time. Like that "swing and glide" analysis, which strikes me as a very techno way of listening,

i would take this up, except i don't know what you mean.

:-)

Why doesn't Basic Channel/Deep Chord etal get the same hammering Kompakt is getting? Cerainly they've only got 1 trick and it's been repressed/repackaged for nearly 10years.

and this is way back in the fucking day ... when roman flugel is putting out records called "holy garage" and tracks by BLAZE for god's sake ... and albums that sounded like old glasgow underground tracks (which isn't deep house because ... it doesn't have trombone solos? so what is it again?) ... except now another set of people who were plowing a similar furrow at that time (ricardo villalobos was spinning tracks that sort of sound like recent guidance or old trackmode or even older nervous / cajual tracks - "love family trax" - even more than they sound like "timecode" or perlon blipblopbleep) and suddenly swung way far away (into competing w/ isolee in the deconstruction sweepstakes) are suddenly swinging back into "real instruments" / "spacious arrangements" / "mid-tempo swingy beats" / "acoustic guitar solos" and THIS is why everyone is suddenly excited, because now people are doing things that ironically have veered back into house, but at a slightly different angle, this is not merely heavily-deconstructed osunlade or vikter duplaix (in that even though i could see mixing up osunlade and villalobos (or even ashley beedle and villalobos!), i couldn't see mixing villalobos w/ faze action or the idjut boys or peven everett or dj gregory)

this is where former alt-techno superstars (villalobos, et al) start swinging weirdly back into house not from usual angles but from the direction of spacy, dubby west coast house music ("cosmic sandwich"), from the direction of ibiza chill-out (villalobos' "hireklon"), from the "afro-tech" direction of artists like jaymz nylon and osunlade (lots of recent perlon releases post-"superlongevity three")

this is why we validate a domain-name squat like this ... is deep house alive and well? yes, which is why we're not calling these artists "deep house artists" (whereas that label would work fine for squatters like faze action or chateau flight) ... but examining the links between them and "deep house" (even in your ultraconservative defn) is v useful for understanding this new trend in the music AND (more importantly for myself) helps to promote deep house.

if you are such a big deep house fan - why are you trying to keep discussion of it off ILM. you should be HAPPY i am dragging deep house into this!

-- biz (b...), October 7th, 2005 8:35 AM.

basic channel = "defunct for twelve years" clause?!?!

deep chord = "nowhere near as hyped as kompakt" relative-obscurity clause?

also if you need evidence of a hammering, all it takes is the words "uninspired basic channel rip-off" to sort of sink a shining career arc (hello, kit c1ayton?)

people want to go out to have a good time and not be preached to about what constitutes a proper scene and what strict style of music is allowed in a dj set. i'm not saying that deep house as a genre is bad, but it's that whole totalitarian style of thinking behind it that sucks the life out of it. it's so weird that that is what developed out of the freedom of the late disco / early house party scene. artists and scenes both need the freedom to innovate and grow and if that means the definition of deep house becomes more inclusive then why not?

one of my favorite mix cd moments is that françios k's essential mix starts off with a maurizio track.

I don't mind adjectives, just trying to use the right ones. And I should have written "what are potentially any producer's roots". About the Delano & Kenny Dope tracks, I just think they're funkier than deep.

the "there" was getting increasingly close to trackmode for a while
You know, if that's all it amounted to in the matter of achieving sustainable "deepness" over time, I am all in the color unimpressed.

larry heard and marshall jefferson sell themselves to euro labels. why?? YOU GUESSED IT - "to raise awareness ... about themselves"! and to buy a little piece of current label cachet
This is wrong, so wrong. They released a few records and probably got paid this time, end of story.

Now the swing and glide thing, that's a tougher and more interesting discussion. Not sure it should be had at this point in this thread ?

well, i would say "a label" not "the label"

but a VERY good example to bring up, esp when you look at something like the epochal "button down mind of daniel bell" dj mix (whose impact was probably unfairly deferred by the runaway success of the follow-up herbert mix)

i mean, check out the tracklisting for the final third!!!

11. ultymate - vybe (todd edwards rework)
12. mono - high life (herbert dub)
13. nick holder - feelin sad
14. mr james barth - above the skyline
15. ricardo villalobos - fussmilch
16. round four - found a way
17. anthony shakir - detroit state of mind

the deep house / microhouse divide ... as expressed in the "villalobos fabric" ILX thread ... BRIDGED!!! FIVE YEARS AGO!!!!!!!!!

holy crap, i need to sit down. discogs.com is like some sort of I CHING / oblique strategies / tea leaves type critical crack

he's really the only one addressing you
you addressed me so much just a few minutes ago I can't even finish reading & thinking about it, let alone answer it properly. What is this BS ?

Even though BC has been silent for years, they're still put on a pedestal by nearly everyone despite only ever releasing 1 track. I say this having every BC/Mauritzio 12" and CD. Would they be as revered if they had been followed closely by Bloggers and mailing lists in 1994/95 or would they have been shot down for mining the same deep veins?

I'm not following the names on the posts but whoever is stating the similarities to Deep House and Minimal artists is OTM. Nobody should be shocked about the evolution of sound in electronic dance music. It's typical for a genre to start to get stale while an underground scene bubbles over with experimentation and excitement. The parent genre then adapts to those changes and reinvents itself within the same parameters but with new techniques and borrowed elements. James Holden did this with Progressive House -> Minimal Techno -> Glitch. Satoshie Tomie took elements of Deep House -> Techno -> Progressive to kick off the dark, prog sound featured on Communicate. Kompakt (Rex)has done it with Glitch and Progressive. Genre's are fluid, they are not set in stone. Blending and stealing ideas is healthy for the scene and exciting for music lovers.

BUT - i don't really think kompakt belong on this thread at all!! it's true i think they are basically wack but they don't have much to do w/ any sort of deep house / minimal techno linkage

Mr. James Barth (Cari Lekebusch) -- SEEK: Stealing Music, High Society and Knocking Boots (with Alexi Delano)

No, i can't see the linkage to Deep House and Kompakt but
the minimal scene in general can defo be linked. Kompakt is closer to Progressive House than Deep House.

i would rather talk about specific labels and more specific scenes ... on the level of smaller divisions of deep house ... "smooth" deep house like GU (glenn underground or glasgow underground, take your pick)), psychedelic west coast house (jeno / garth / doc martin) ... hooking up w/ one arm of the microhouse scene - perlon but not really kompakt (yet), some MBF releases but not really traum, dessous for sure, poker flat not so much, musik krause not quite (okay maybe metaboman), cocoon certainly not, bpitch defn not, etc

Alola is another good label that prepped the ears of house lovers for the deeper sounds that started coming in the late 90's. The More Space To Dance comp. is great and releases by Pete Moss, Vince Watson and 16b can fit in minimal sets today.

Clubs, people. This is dance music we're writing about, not uber-cerebral listening stuff. The vibe at a deep house club remains somehow very different. You better have danced a few hours to an actual deep house set before you slap techno concepts all over it !

They could play some of the labels you mentioned, but they don't. Closer Musik, west coast psychedelia, Köhncke, none of that gets anywhere near the turntables.

Early Swag (Drum Hydrolics and ep's on Junior Boys Own) are also still devistating on a large system. The depths achieced and sonic qualities on those Ep's (Collected Works comp) are as deep and moving as any Villalobos.

1) basic channel had 10 releases to kompakt's 100+

2) BC was closely followed at the time by zines / internets / magazines / spotters / etc

3) i never gushed to anybody about any kompakt release, ever (except superpitcher's "fieber" and the "think about you" remix and maybe triple r's "friends" and TT's "smallville" but those mixes had hardly any kompakt tracks anyway

4) i don't think kompakt is a bad label, just not a great label, and certainly not in keeping w/ their massively swelled profile compared to classic, playhouse, perlon, MFF, ferox, etc

i think said swelled profile boils down to

1) availability + good distribution + prominent reviews on pitchfork and other major outlets (this is not some weird conspiracy, just a natural effect that ILXors as tastemakers - individual consumers as tastemakers, makers-of-our-own-taste, really - can go some distance towards scaling-back)

2) internet hyperbole (total six = "classic status"? ok "instant classic" maybe ... but man you must be much more easily impressed than me! i have a hard time calling "famous when dead 1" or "globus vol. 5" a classic, let alone something that came out this summer)

can someone pls confirm that I AM EXPERIENCED

and crucially, much of it achieves the same effect by using the same techniques

by "new wave house" you mean the metro area / idjut boys / lindstrom / rong / bear funk type artists that are mixing up the faze action approach w/ spacy deep minimal tricks?

i wanted to write something abt this for the new blog but new job / new city (something i and jess and phil are all grappling w/ right now) sort of pre-empted it

i wanted to call it "edit aesthetic" house because i think it has lots of similarities w/ late-disco edit artists (all those danny krivit / francois k / w gibbons / l levan versions) and also w/ edit-obsessed techno side projects like carl craig's "paperclip people"

-- vahid (vfoz...), October 7th, 2005.
------------------------------------------------

not sure those were my thoughts you're summing up there. I'm not saying Kompakt are as great as the buzz around them suggests and i certainly haven't bought any of the Famous When Dead comps (though i do have most of the 12"s they contain). Kompakt has about 15-20 great records but they are suffering from having too many releases. Thankfully the whole Shuffle bizness died off and i'm looking forward to further Kompakt Pop releases, but Kompakt proper is by no means CLASSIC, and not anywhere near DUD. They're as iconic as Basic Channel but could suffer the same fate as Naked Music, i.e. too many tracks/releases that sound the same.

Basic Channel had nowhere near the kind of support/following as Kompakt. For one thing, those guys almost never did interviews and were the epitome of Faceless Techno (bollocks). Yes, they were hyped and talked about, but not nearly on the scale of Kompakt.

-- blunt (blunt120...), October 7th, 2005 9:27 AM. (blunt)

except

1) you look at some prominent deep house DJs (lance desardi, doc martin, dj spun) and their track selections are veering closer and closer to minimal house lately (straight into it, if you buy my classic + MFF = microhouse thesis)

2) i have been arguing that closer musik / kohncke don't really fit in this company

3) we are talking about villalobos, not about deep house. if villalobos starts playing deep house tracks, that says something about villalobos vis-a-vis deep house, but not necessarily anything about deep house

4) again this is why it's a trend and not a scene - i don't think there are any clubs w/ their own deephouse/minimal crossover vibes quite yet, though we're all used by now to seeing a trance/minimal crossover vibe (mayer + superpitcher = nu-sasha+digweed) so maybe we just have to watch phil sherburne's communications from barcelona very closely for the next few months

by "new wave house" i mean the spacy tricks, yes, but also "retro" arpeggiated synth bass and just general gear obsession. new romantic house!

xpost

this a whole fertile and febrile bedroom scene that is going undocumented =(

2) I agree and what I'm saying is, the deep house scene doesn't want nor need them

3) I know. I showed up mid-thread because I was exasperated by the misuse of a concept. Shoo me away, I can't be bothered to start a thread on this anyway because I'll just get trolled to death

4) this summer I DJed 3 Barcelona locations and went clubbing there. No such crossover in sight...

unfortunately i don't know enough about gear to name names, but the sound is also more analog rather than digital even if the tracks are made digitally. it's very fetishistic.

OKAY OKAY PLS I CAN'T TAKE THE SUSPENSE

top 10 deep house artists, quickly

Antonio Ocasio, Blaze, Bobby Konders, Boogie Soliterre, Chez Damier & Ron Trent, Claude Monnet, Dimitri From Paris (those are mixes), DJ Gregory, DJ Spinna, Franck Roger, Frankie Feliciano (that's the 11th but I love his stuff so bad I can't stop before).

10) amp fiddler
9) soul ii soul
8) osunlade
7) incognito
6) dj jazzy jeff
5) herbie hancock's future ii future band
4) roy ayers
3) fela kuti
2) mr fingers
1) 2 WAY TIE: LOOSE ENDS / COLDCUT FT LISA STANSFIELD

ok, i guess i would have called that stuff "jazzy spiritual garage house" ... anyway ... danny krivit and francois k like basic channel and tech-house so you lose.

really, though, let's quit ... ok fine KERRI CHANDLER is deep house and DOC MARTIN isn't ... problem solved.

=(

so ... uh ... HEY GUYS ... isn't it interesting how minimal techno is veering closer and closer to ... uh ... LEFTIELD AND/OR SORTA TECH HOUSE?

http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/1999/042299/frankie.gif

blunt, where did you play here?

My friend went to a party recently where there was a naked japanese dj in a pink plastic cape and a frying pan full of K sitting on a table in the middle of the dancefloor.

i think i mentioned this earlier ... i saw hawtin spin a couple of weeks ago in SF. before he went on a local dj did a support set. the climax of the set was a long long long session where he was cutting back and forth between paperclip people's "throw", "cosmic sandwich" and maurizio's "m7" (i think! or maybe it was m4 or m5 ... i get the M series confused a lot) ... anyway it was definitely "deep house" in the confused and druggy and DEEEEEP theo parrish / moodymann sense, definitely "deep house" in the druggy and spacy and dubby west coast house sense, definitely "deep house" in the (maybe) soul/r+b end of tech house (swags and glasgow undergrounds and so on) but definitely also minimal techno in the germany/detroit/UK sense.

i think though, that there is no scene of people spinning sets that quite hit this vibe consistently, anywhere, right now, though quite a few people (like villalobos himself) are doing it in isolated pieces ... think of the taka taka section where he sandwiches a vainquer track between two percussion-heavy pieces of disco deep house madness ... brothers' vibe, maurice fulton's remix of walter jones "all god's children" and kat williams (and please PLEASE don't say luis rodriguez ain't deep house or walter or kat either, else you lose all of your cred points and you are REVEALED as jose padilla's internet pseudonym)

this is sort of like in college, when my friends and i just figured there were huge warehouse raves in germany where people did slow motion walking-in-circle dances to basic channel records for 12 hours (sort of like the prison scene in pink floyd's "the wall" that was ripped from a painting used for a dickens story, except a dance, someone pls post a picture somewhere) ... without really realizing there was no 'scene" as such, maybe isolated djs doing sets like that but mostly serving as space-filler in millsian techno sets.

On one hand I'm inclined to indict Vahid's love of Playhouse for the fact that Playhouse has featured more US West Coast artists than any other label in the current electro/minimal scene, and I kind of think, why is that so worthy of praise?

I don't know, I think I still want to suggest that for many people JT Donaldson and Classic and MFF were the orthodoxy, they were what Kompakt is to Vahid, the constant "this is real music" older brother crap you hear as a young fan of dance music, and NEVER moreso than when electroclash took off (ie the first actual event of most 18-22 year olds clubbing lifetime)

So there's bound to be tension and animosity, and difficulty in reconciling the too. Perhaps I'm being provocative but that is how I feel about it, I just don't think people have any obligation to like anything and I don't see any problem with the "monolithic" status of electrohouse at the moment.

Isn't one of the core attractions about dance music (and dance labels!! hence one of kompakt's failings) that whole monolithic thing? I dunno, for me I think it is, I can't help but feel we're getting into some very complex form of the eclecticism vs purism debate as applied to DJing, and I've just got in from a 9 hour shift at work.

also, villalobos is playing in about 4 hrs maybe in manchester, with steve bug! poker flat and perlon! ha! see you there!

oh yeah! the 22nd! the problem with fabric is ive sort of ruled it out of my thinmking as every single one of myu friends seems to hate the place, which means i havent been there. dont think even luciano would tempt em. but is there an ILX thing going on?

i really really don't understand why people hate fabric - i'd heard so many bad things before i went, and now it's my favourite club anywhere. it could do with a bit more floorspace perhaps, and maybe lasers in the main room too, but whatever.

- everybody drinks and/or takes drugs while going out

- ketamine house works incredibly well with all drugs and booze, moreso than all other genres, hell you can even dance sober to it

- hence, ketamine house is played all night every night

thats about it. hope i could be of service

01] Only Freak - Can't Get Away (Solid Groove Remix) - Freerange CDR
02] Manoo & Francois A - Traffic EP - Buzzin' Fly 12"
03] Minus 8 - Solaris (Pascal/Minus 8 Remix - Compost Black 12"
04] Audiomontage - Naughty Neighbour EP - Freerange 12"
05] Solid Groove - Throwing Stones - Dubsided CDR
06] Sinden - If I - Loungin' CDR
07] Swag - Fat Hack - Version 12"
08] Argy - Love Dose (Luciano Remix) - Poker Flat 12"
09] John Dahlback - Parkdancer - Brique Rouge 12"
10] Lo:Rise - Life Goes On (Webster & Iveson Mix) - Miso 12"
11] Mike Monday - Tooting Warrior - Playtime CDR
12] Loudeast - Duckbeats Vs. Mermaid - Odori 12"
13] Marlon D - Love Is The Key (House Party Dub) - Jellybean Soul 12"
14] Traffic Signs - Hold It - Traffic Signs 12"
15] V/A - All As One Again EP - Sonar Kollektiv 12"
16] Slam - Kill The Pain (Marc Houle Dub) - Soma CDR
17] Max Fresh - Lemon Sampler - Loungin' CDR
18] Amberflame - Rise Hour (Jimpster Remix) - Polyphonics CDR
19] Alexander East - Aqualung 2 Come - Raum Music 12"
20] Brett Johnson - One Man - Classic 12"

ok ... it's sort of like this: we lionize certain labels and artists (microhouse). and then we try to analyze what we like about them, what sort of qualities we enjoy in their music. and i want to say, if we enjoy traits x,y and z in abundance, and traits x.y and z are increasingly present in a different sort of music that fans of the first style sort of ignore (deep house / tribal house) then i just want to point out that this other style is either 1) being unfairly ignored (this is charitable) or that 2) traits x,y and z aren't really what fans of the style are after and instead they're suckers too impressed w/ german graphic design they enjoy some other aspect of the music or are just exaggerating the presence of x,y and z.

ronan if you don't want to analyze why you like the music you like on this sort of level - admittedly there are many other ways to look at dance music other than on this sort of semi-formal level (ie we can analyze fans + scenes + sociology and stuff in which case, yeah, i agree, microhouse is something very different to deep/tribal house!) - then i can forgive you for thinking my ideas are silly!

Not really true, though! The Total comps are very clean and pretty and mod, and the Cologne CoA used for the Speicher logo is very appealing in a minimal stormtrooper kind of way, but just look at "Touch" and "Kozi Comes Around" and "Doppelleben" - YIKES!!!

Once you've purchsed those records, you're cleared of that charge.

Another reason is that Classic (as distinct MFF, who I would insist do get props from German house fans) just don't sound the same as German house all that often. I'd be reluctant to endorse the claim "you know, German house and deep house share the same traits!" as if this was some straightforward fait accompli argument: I downloaded almost all the tracks you posted on the basis of them being "proto-microhouse", and while I could sort of see where you were coming from with each of them, I really had to squint my ears - what similarities there were seemed to be either a result of a shared techno/house lineage, or a shared access to certain ideas about how dance music should sound ("spacey", "deep", "sonically detailed") which I don't think German house would ever claim a monopoly over. And these are the deep house/tech house etc. tracks which are supposedly most like microhouse etc. - to say nothing of yr Frankie Felicianos (who, what little I've heard, has mostly underwhelmed me, quite apart from him being v. trad house).

I mean you could as easily say "German house and prog share the same traits!" but that doesn't mean any random Tilt track will sound like German house, and it certainly doesn't mean that not bigging up Tilt is not a sign that you're misunderstanding your own enjoyment of German house.

Whereas I would concede that James Holden and MFF are examples of non-German House artists so obviously close to that (broadly speaking) "sound" that not recognising the connection would require cloth-ears and a great deal of obstinacy.

I don't know "Acidhaze" but I highly recommend their Cuban Fire album. Every track is great, but especially "Musica", "Future Dub", "Hot Stuff" and "Skyline" (the last track above all). There's dubby elements and tribal elements and disco elements and etc. etc. but it's all united by its intensity, there's a slightly delirious quality to it all which obv. works brilliantly in deep house. At times it reminds me of Layo & Bushwacka's "Deep South", which doesn't hurt as that is one of my favourite house tracks ever.

yes! this is my main point of contention! i think too many people just assume german microhouse artists (and their endorsees on the other side of the tech-house spectrum, ie holden and the MFA) are a shining pinnacle of intricate, listenable, well-developed and emotional house music in a vast sea of pre-digested bongo loops and unconsidered filter presets - which is just not true!

3. fabric 06 - tyler stadius
4. dj garth - revolutions in sound (greyhound comp)
4.1 community recordings - "magic circle (mellow mountain dub)

6. doc martin - fabric 10
7. chris duckenfield (aka SWAG) - sheffield mix session
(midnight-in-the-magic-mushroom forest spaced-out jazzy house)

8. johnny rock & matt styles - see you @ the party (MFF comp)
9. mark farina + lance desardi - san francisco session vol 5
10. mark farina + derrick carter - live at OM
11. kenny hawkes - nite:life 017
12. v/a - tribal gathering presents sankey's soap
(jittery and twitchy boompty-not-boompty)

13. steve bug - da minimal funk 3
(deutsch not deutsch!)

andrew weatherall - live at the social
v/a - adventures in techno soul (ferox compilation)
paper recordings - presents robodisco
dj jeno - imperial dub vol. 3
paul woolford - essential mix
carl craig - essential mix

nor is it getting into all of that edit-aesthetic stuff / prima norsk scene stuff tricky and i were getting all excited about upthread (only because you can't really call that minimal w/ a straight face, though in some ways it is, ie built from a few components which are shuffled against one another, except instead of isolated clicks and pops, it's chunks of tracks, which is what edits are really about anyway, it's minimal techno except built out of disco or hiphop samples instead of 909 noises)

and also i guess a big difference which tim hit on upthread and which i am guilty of ignoring is that this stuff really DOES sound different in that it's not always made of clicks and pops and loop-finding-jazz-noises and scrapes and farts, but i don't really think that's important because placing a premium on scrapes and farts is stupid, and smacks of clicks-n-cuts glitch-thinking, which is a really lame and reductive and unsexy and played-out school of thinking, and i can't say i'm impressed when people tow that party line because some of the same people would roll over and die if you said autechre was more advanced than dj hype because industrial clanking is more whatever than james brown loops and ragga samples (ie germanic clanks and thumps vs bongos and rhodes) (ie annoying essential arguments against bongos are wack)

ha ha ha

Which reminds me- I think I have to change my ILM name now, as it reads like I was probably DJing that show....

also i admit that i was kind of baffled when blunt named dj gregory as a deep house fave. isn't he more like traditional house? where do we draw the line there?

well, i was trying to keep it as topical as possible! ie, in-print, last 2 or 3 years, and classic-style or west coast house that is open to the token german micro tracks (as opposed to german microhouse that is open to the token chicago or MFF track)

of course, all of SF sessions discs are applicable here ... oh, here's another i forgot:

v/a - high in a basement (the early intersection, or rather the point of divergence, between the edits aesthetic and the not-quite-micro of trippy deep house)

i'm not sure anybody has figured out where to draw the lines for the sort of things we are talking about (and i am trying to hype to the skies). you can call it deep whatever but really i think a lot of it just gets called "leftfield house" or "leftfield" (andy K to thread, i think he wrote the genre description for "left field house" on allmusic.com) or actually quite a bit of it crosses over w/ downtempo (esp when you cross over into the "deep techno" end of tech house, where you have techno producers doing very soulful house-oriented disco work, like lots of the morgan geist projects or, for another example, the detroit clique from the "deepest shade of techno" compilations)

the OMG YE FULES factor of trying to convince people that villalobos = techy deep house has suddenly been eclipsed by the insanity of having to argue that prescription = a tech house label.

Said folders do not represent blunt's or anybody's prescribed notion of deep house. Gregory does produce & DJ in a somewhat harder, tribal style. Which brings me to comment on Africanism, I think the label does overproduced-sounding, somewhat African-inspired house. I do like a few of them among which the recent "Imbalaye" by Bjorn Lundt. It's not very refined but does a dynamic relaunching job of sorts when things are rolling mid-set.

I wanted to draw a deep house line up there the other day. I've been told that my conception of deep house = "trad house" / "jazzy spiritual garage house" here. I get the idea - and I wa ssort of asking for it - but I'll stick to my definition, cower in my corner and resist the temptation to play Deep House Cop in TechnoLand.

Having said that I've found over the last few years that I'm more likely to be disappointed by the deep house purchases I make, and that's tended to be make me more cautious, more reluctant to splash out or even investigate something unless I have it on good authority that I'm gonna love it.

So maybe the problem for me is that I haven't found a deep house guarantor: the discourse around it hasn't made me feel warranted in taking the leap to the same extent as a lot of the discourse around german house (of course there's no single discourse there: I would trust Andy K but I would never trust Boomkat). When I read a description of a deep house track, I usually have no idea if it's going to fall into the category of deep house I love or deep house I can't be bothered with. Is this a failing on the part of the discourse, myself, or both? I dunno.

Maybe you can fill part of the guarantor role though. I saw the Hipp-E and Halo Fabric disc for cheap the other day and fully intend to buy it come payday (I've seen a really old Doc Martin mix around from like 1995 but that's it on that front). Of course if I'm disappointed this will only further harden me!

i would prefer it if there were no lines drawn, but i suppose we have to converse about this stuff somehow! and rampant eclecticism (which is somewhat suggested by calling everything either house or techno or electro) is just as bad as purism in my opinion. but! i do like to eg. mix dj gregory with mathew jonson with "we r are why" and that's pretty leftfield/eclectic...

woah xpost.

blunt, your playing of deep house cop was essential to the development of this thread. and this is a good thread i think.

"lovelee dae" (beatless 20:20 vision rework)" from famous when dead

the crucially woooooozy intersection of edits, US deep house, UK tech house, microhouse and the endlessly billowing cloud-tides of dub-house reverb from basic channel / chain reaction / kompakt.

That's a little true ...and not very helpful.

I get the sense you're a bit scathing of it as a dilettante reference point, but I've always thought the second Body & Soul mix was a great attempt to unite the most spacey prog aspects of deep house with the trad vocal house in a quite dynamic way (compare/contrast volume 4, which is a lot more straight-down-the-line).

Speaking of which, Vahid! That Ralph Lawson Stars on 33 is awesome, along similar lines as the Eskimo Volume 3 mix, and while it's not as lifechanging as that (what is?) I still heartily recommend it. Of course it's hard to imagine a mix with Julien Jabre on it that I wouldn't love.

?!?!?!?!

Well, in form/content more than quality (Eskimo 3 would be in my top five mix-cds ever list) - both move between deep house, disco and laidback soul/funk according to the same logic, except that Stars on 33 is paced like the reverse of Eskimo 3. Jabre's "Sun is Back" is glorious, as is (in an entirely different way) Swag's "2 + 2 = 5".

http://www.discogs.com/release/318037

Various - Madnet - Part Two: Music For Life

Label: Madnet Productions
Catalog#: download.2
Format: CD
Country: Germany
Released: 2001
Genre: Electronic
Style: House, Deep House
Notes: Cover: Ehlerbracht AG
Distribution Thru Intergroove
Rating: 5.0/5 (3 votes) Rate It
Submitted by: rror

Tracklisting:
1 Boobjazz Celebration Suite (Midnight Ceremony) (6:49)
2 Blaze Funky People (Freestyle Man Mix) (7:15)
Remix - Freestyle Man
3 Meitz Mayibuye I Africa (Original) (7:27)
Featuring - Vido Jilashe
4 Glissando Bros. Even Better (Original) (4:39)
Featuring - Clair Dietrich
5 Luomo Tessio (Original Version) (11:53)
6 Dimbiman King Salomon (6:45)
7 Tojami Sessions The Last Heat (4:43)
8 Marvin Dash Twelve Hours Of Work And Still Can't Sleep (7:10)
9 Mille & Hirsch Jazz Hat's (8:41)
10 Glance Caj (Album Version) (6:59)
11 C-Rock Deep In The Green (Cd Edit) (7:21)

Good night, and thank you.

Mind you some other stuff I've heard by them didn't do much for me.

:) just kid-dingggg

I have the above mentioned disc and both the packaging and tunes are meticulously detailed. Love, love, love that remix of Blaze. The whole thing just staddles the minimal/deep house divide. Don't know why it took me so long to remember that disc.

Actually, anecdote relative to many of Vahid's comments on that Fabric mix, and Mayer in general:

I worked an art opening last night DJ'd by Sandra Collins, and she dropped two tracks that are on the Mayer Fabric mix-

WestBam & Nena's "Oldschool, Baby" and Richard Davis's "Bring Me Closer"

Don't really know what this says about either her or Mayer, though she also closed her set with that Jacques Lu Cont remix of The Killer's "Mr. Brightside", which is apparently the set-closer du jour of the big American crowds, as James LaVelle closed his Coachella set in May with the exact same track.....

hmmm ... i was just thinking, maybe it could all be understood in terms of the massive influence maurizio has had on both sides of the tech-house / microhouse spectrum? just listening to M4 / M4.5 and M5 and it's really really similar to a lot of current tech-house and deep house, on the structural level and sound design level, if not on the level of actual instrumentation or rhythm.

http://www.fabriclondon.com/eflyer/kitties/october01_fabricfirst.gif

Hooray, and such. Again, sorry if it's already been said.

this is a bit patronising, but presumably you're talking about whatever strawmen, languishing desperately beyond the realms of common stupidity, got your goat about this whole thing in the first place!

I would just as easily bemoan Classic/MFF/West Coast Deep House fans for not liking anything techy or electroey as I would the reverse, and it absolutely goes both ways, ILM is a pretty small village and hardly a good prism from which to view everything else.

But more than this, how do you know your interpretation of "traits x y and z" fits with other peoples? I mean if you actually think so many people (and I'd still love to hear who these people are) are actually so thick that they only listen to music because of graphic design, and can't see that perhaps they don't find any of the traits you cite in other genres, well, I think that's a fairly crazy presumption of peoples tastes/intelligence.

But even more than that, I'm amazed you actually think you can define traits by your own interpretation and expect others to hear the same thing, when the overwhelming evidence (ie they vote with their feet/ears) suggests otherwise, I mean how cynical, people really aren't that thick!

Actually the entire argument to me now feels like "these 13 year old kids listening to boybands are just being fed this stuff! If music radio wasn't so stilted towards image and mass produced rubbish then they would like real music, if they just had a chance to hear it!"

Now while the similarities between Justin and Nirvana are probably, at face value, more difficult to spot than those between Kompakt and Coco Machete, I still don't think this argument holds water.

Even if Kompakt and the labels you cite were somehow absolutely similar, and this could be proven (a fairly mental hypothesis), the fact is you have to let people discover these apparent similarities for themselves, some will, some won't, probably depending on another zillion factors which make up their own personal prism of judgement for liking or not liking music, which is almost certain to be entirely different to yours given it probably includes what they ate for breakfast that day, how someone was rude to them in 1996, etc.

I think the fact is that as far as crossover is concerned, there is a fairly natural path from poppier electro (and currently very popular) stuff like Mylo or Vitalic or Tiefschwarz or Black Strobe to minimal. This path at the moment does not easily include US Deep House.

I find myself turned off by mixes which attempt to fuse the two because I actually don't like alot of the West Coast records at the moment, I don't like DJ T's "Beat The Street" because it reminds me of them!

Does this mean I am automatically unaware of the benefits of US deep house?

Of course it doesn't, it's like saying because I don't like tomato ketchup in a curry I am completely ignorant.

As far as I see, it's ok, and in my opinion helpful, to suspend your dilletante tendencies when listening to a mix, or watching a DJ, and I don't even believe this means you're only looking for one aesthetic or being narrow, I think that the opposite view is just too broad and laboured.

But furthermore and more importantly, I think it's important to accept that other people might actually be open minded in their listening! I just can't see why people would have a vendetta against US Deep House, any resentment I feel towards it is caused by (a) the fact that there's just as much opposition in the reverse direction towards European electroey stuff, and (b) the fact that it's been the default aesthetic since I got into dance music, and after a while when a new one comes along you begin to question it.

Is there anything wrong with any of the above, I really feel I've been as comprehensive as I can.

I actually think Vahid, and I hope this doesn't restart WW3, is just being mean and has one or two people in mind but doesn't want to name them!

the entire argument to me now feels like "these 13 year old kids listening to boybands are just being fed this stuff! If music radio wasn't so stilted towards image and mass produced rubbish then they would like real music, if they just had a chance to hear it!"

yeah, that's pretty much the angle i was coming at it from!! except my take on it is sort of like deep house = southern rap and kompakt = outkast.

at least deep house and purism are as intertwined as whatever form of (ignorant?) purism you are associating with kompakt?

And as I keep saying, lots of people (at least in Europe) like Kompakt who are just regular dance fans! not whatever the other evil thing is!

In my personal situation it's the deep house which is the Imaginary Dance Music in that i have and enjoy a fair amount of it on record, but can't seem to get into it in a club environment - although this may reflect the quality of the club nights, i dunno. For the record the best regular night in Melbourne is run by members of the Little Beasties, a MFF act, and they play awesome sets of Classic/MFF/bleeding into electro-house. Their sheer ubiquity is perhaps why I tend to see Classic/MFF as having a very high profile.

Ok but that "kiddie" argument still doesn't really hold up, Vahid, because we both know that I (i.e. your loyal Kompakt defender) haven't been spoon-fed Kompakt by anyone, and that when you really get down to it, Kompakt is no more available in Southern CA than other dance labels (and even less so In Da Club).

Sure, Pitchfork and a few other indie outlets are on their nutsack almost exclusively w/r/t dance music reviews (this really being your main gripe), but that's hardly a qualifier for me. I wasn't even all that impressed when I first heard the Total comps (remember- I sold a few back around the time the Mayer Fabric came out- ha- it does seem to be a landmark!).

But you are correct in referencing one thing- Lawrence. I think you should just fess up and put it on record that you don't really like spare, melancholy dance music, either- and since Kompakt has quite a bit of that, it would also make sense. Because there is no legitimate objective reason to hate on Lawrence. (Here's where someone potentially clobbers me) And I'm still bewildered as to why you're against him because some of Lawrence's tracks have the same aesthetic dance floor value as any of your Basic Channel tracks. Not as murky and/or propulsive, but you can certainly hear the BC influence in some of his music.

Plus it's possible that the first song I ever danced to was The Cure's "A Forest", so what do you expect? Actually, no, it was probably the Brother's Johnson "Stomp" when I was like six years old (disco parents), but you get what I'm saying...

Presumably this is another packaging thing, Lawrence has definitely committed that venial sin. perhaps his next release should have vague sci fi references and titles entirely made up of numbers, in a plain black sleeve? Or alternatively he could sex things up a bit, why can't Lawrence do that?

x-post, Kompakt is also getting Pitchfork love from people who post here! So is it really Pitchfork love exclusively? Can we then assume these people are not idiots cos we know them, but would damn them if we didn't?

Deep House = Neptunes/Star Trak
Kompakt = Dabrye/Chocolate Industries

Most people into Kompakt are just not into hiphop.

So perhaps Deep House=Pete Rock etc, Kompakt=techno, haha. or Deep House=Pete Rock, Kompakt=Rock.

my main contention is that german house does very little that deep/tech house labels don't also do effectively and the only reason i keep insisting on this so vehemently is that derrick carter is paying me fat stacks of cash to street team for him on ILX.

this is a good point

ok, biz, i'm not really sure where you are coming from. let's compare

ralpha lawson's latest remix for the stompaphunk label (from lance desardi's latest mix for OM)

a track from dj t's boogie playground on get physical

now which one is minimal/electro and which one is tech house / deep house?

download one krause duo no. 2 set, son

a track by cajmere from the same dj t mix

a track by the modernist for speicher

which is minimal and which is deep house?

xpost. I've offered Artists, labels, tracklists etc. you're not alone, just lonely.

and "because it's not deeeeep, maaaaaan don't count as good answers.

Those looking for deep house will sort the wheat from the chaff.
Do I get bonus points for clichés

most of 4/4 structured dance music is extremely similar in constuction. it's the choice of sounds that really hold the identity of the track. if you took a deep house or minimal track, used the midi signal but switched the sounds used, you could turn a Poker Flat single into a Naked Music single. It's the SOUND of the record, not the structure.

deep / minimal house + straight techno (the sort dave clarke or KMS or liberator djs spin)

or

deep / minimal house + straight house (of the sort MAW or soulfuric or bob sinclair spin)

and this is what i am arguing, except that i think that at this point, the similarity in sound-design between pokerflat and naked music is startling!! and i think that it behooves us all to stop referring to kompakt etc as microhouse and instead call it the-genre-now-known-as-weak-deep-house-copyism

if you're so good at picking examples, pick 1 actual Deep House cut (not tech house) and 1 song from Kompakt (not I Think About You) and post those examples. frankly, i think you're F.O.S. and trying to stir up some hate, but i'm playing along at this point.

i guess you could argue the insistence on garage / gospel roots, except that is more in effect between kerri + ashley, and theo parrish is as apt to reference maurizio as he is tony humphries (same w/ ibbotson or minimal man) and amp fiddler is off in downtempo / progressive neo soul land anyway.

the stuff you are calling "deep house" i would call "trad house", if only because i think the insistence on strict allegiance to garage + gospel is the one thing about the genre i can't hang with (prob also the one thing i am sure i agree w/ ronan on here) ... i don't mind garage or gospel (i LOVE tony humphries fabric mix and i have some of his other mixsets and love those too) but i think it's a really restrictive defn of what's deep and i DO think tony humphries has achieved relic status by now

=(
=(
=(

You've got to be fucking kidding!

here's a bonus

counterplan - 90 (dj q remix)

doesn't that sound like a lawrence track or something?! is that not microhouse?

Are we supposed to reach a point where you've proved that actually Kompakt is inferior to Deep House and it's QED. I'm sick to the teeth of posting on this thread because all you're doing is second guessing peoples taste, it's not even a sensible argument, there's no end to it because it ultimately amounts to a difference of opinion, but why can't you just accept that other people are not hearing these similarities you keep pointing out.

I mean honestly, you're picking 5 tunes and comparing them with another 5 as if to prove your case, when there are thousands of 12s released every week, is it really as simplistic a process as saying "hey this sounds like this (in my opinion), hence the entire genre this is from is useless copyism".

What about the other 10000 tunes? I just can't believe how silly this whole thread has gotten and it pisses me off to the core to see this general moaning about stuff people like posing as some sort of proper argument.

Furthermore you might care to notice that people HAVE stopped calling Kompakt microhouse, hence ELECTROHOUSE BOBBINS 2004, started about a year ago or more and constant usage of the word "electrohouse" on ILM in the interim.

See below, my last Juno order. I can't fit in West Coast Deep House into my sets, and I know I'm not the only one. I don't like it, I don't like some DJ T tracks because they sound like it, I've openly called out "Beat The Street" and even John Tejada's "Sweat" and Jesper Dahlback because I felt they're too similar to things which other labels like Classic/MFF/20/20 Vision had already done.

For the love of god just accept that there is a different aesthetic to be found within electrohouse, even if you can pick out some similarities between individual tracks. Where are the US Deep House tracks this year that's so so superior to "Piccadilly Circuits", to "Mandarine Girl", to "Daybreak", to "Body Language", to "Zdarlight"?

You're judging electrohouse on a few random outsider tracks and not the central anthems of the scene, where are the US Deep House anthems to compare with the above empirically (still ridiculous but go ahead anyhow) I hear JT Donaldson and co all the time, I listen to loads of their 12s, and they are not, to my ears similar to the big electrohouse records of the day.

Find me the successful DJs playing the actual cutting edge electrohouse anthems, as defined by myself (working on your precedent, in this respect) alongside some of your West Coast Deep House anthems.

Oh yeah and see below, the last few records I purchased on Juno, if you want soundclips, it's a pretty broad spectrum I think, but I would say that. Don't think there are any American records there, but plenty of US influence, just not the same as Utensil records/Lance Desardi etc etc etc.

BABAMARS Move On (remixes) Warm France 12" W 23389 1 1
BREAK 3000 Flash My Best Friend Germany 12" MBFLTD 12004 1 1
COSMIC SANDWICH Man In A Box My Best Friend Germany 12" MBF 12015 1 1
CROWDPLEASER & ST PLOMB feat SELFISH IN BED Rather Be (remixes) Mental Groove Switzerland 12" MG 033 1 1
LEWIS, Philip Morgan Life Soul Mgmt Belgium 12" SOULMGMT 02 1 1
OPTIMUS Deadly Dub Hi Phen Music Delivery Belgium 12" MD 012 1 1
OPTIMUS vs THE WANNADIES Love To Hate You Suicide Belgium 12" SCD 004 1 1
PAN/TONE Sans Adore 240 Volts Germany 12" VOLT 13 1 1
SCHROM, Stefan I Feel For U Boxer Sport Germany 12" BOXER 018 1 1
SKIBA, Maxmilian Rendez Vous Over Mars Boxer Sport Germany 12" BOXER 032 1 1
STRATUS feat ASHA PUTHLI Looking Glass Klein Austria 12" KL 063 1 1

Ok, and the final word on this ridiculous argument is that by suggesting the above, we actually CAN take this all straight BACK TO GERMANY and say that one of your seminal hip-hop/techno/house blueprint influencing artists, Afrika Bambaataa, and quite possibly everything that came after and as a result of him, has been rendered irrelevant and boring and unoriginal, because the man built his career as a copycat sucking on Kraftwerk's dick.....

Checkmate.

What am I supposed to make of this? It seems to be the Lose Control vocals over Body Language! Germans, hip-hop, etc.

What am I supposed to make of this?

Awful. Judge Jules played it on R1 last week. I was rofl-ing that it wasn't even his own concoction, and that someone had actually bothered to press it to vinyl.

ok, that thread hijack's going nowhere either, but i'm listening to vogel right now and supremely happy about it.

I mean, it's not like anyone here is hating on DANCE, and everyone who is picking on certain labels is also still holding half that label's back catalog in their personal collection...

Has anyone here ever met/spoken to/interviewed him? I watched his superstar mini-doc with Hawtin on that Slices DVD, but I didn't really get a sense of his approach to recording. I'm wondering if he actually puts as much thought into his construction and the relationship of his music to other foundations w/r/t historical context and progress as we all dissect here, or if he's more a midi-control-fiddler who makes some noises and then says "oh, that sounded cool"....

is that right?

all i know is, when i listen to eg german things, i really really like it, and when i listened to the stuff vahid suggested on the proto microhouse thread and the clips he has put up, i didnt really like that. im not really sure why i shouild be worried if the germans are copying it badly, because i suppose in theory i should have heard vahids examples and been like "OMG i renounce these imitators!" but i couldnt even really hear any link between the two (this is the protomicrohouse stuff), and it just didnt sound as funky as kompakt et al. also, the bongos stuff and sax breaks that iver heard, well i prefer clanking to that. its not objectively better to have clanking than bongos but i just prefer it. this doesnt make me deluded, nor a 13 year old, i just get off on blips and bleeps*. hey im a corny clicks n cuts person! well whatever. in my experience people who buy naked music stuff (in the UK) have strong opinions about what their music represents ("soul", "real music" etc - these sound like cliches but working in a shop that sold that sort of stuff i heard people sya this shit a lot) and so they seemed to have exactly the airs and graces that vahid ascribes to newbie gushing converts-to-house ("us house is so cheesy!"), but just about different things.

you know what, kids listening to bassline house in a vauxhall nova laugh at goths and would laugh at their music if they went to a goth disco, but the goths go home and laugh about chav music etc.

whos right? and who are the goths and who are the chavs?

*bassline has big big basslines that are so pitched up that they come out as squeaky bleeps that sound awesome, and that scene is 1010010 miles away from kompakt in terms of "quality", "artwork" etc etc etc. so bleeps dont equal awkward uppity eggheads.

how did i miss that ...?

(also, so i don't have to go back through the thread, has the m mayer night happened yet?)

ta

yeah okay we're on to the point, except the real thing that all the german people copy badly ie DEEP HOUSE, that is only my opinion when i am feeling jokey and stuff, i certainly don't think deep house is any "realer" than jokey house.

couldnt even really hear any link between the two (this is the protomicrohouse stuff), and it just didnt sound as funky as kompakt et al

hmmm ... well i guess i can't help you. WHY AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO HEARS LINKS?!?

also, the bongos stuff and sax breaks that iver heard, well i prefer clanking to that. its not objectively better to have clanking than bongos but i just prefer it. this doesnt make me deluded, nor a 13 year old, i just get off on blips and bleeps*. hey im a corny clicks n cuts person!

okay, this is interesting to me ... because the usual reason people give for "microhouse is better" is "microhouse is more intricate, textured, creative ..." and now people are on the fall back retreat position of "well HEY we just PREFER ITALO NOISES and BLEEPS and CLANKS because ... well NOT BECAUSE WE ARE EGGHEADS ... but ... DEEP HOUSE DUDES ARE SNOBS, OK!!?!?!"

so if i can just get people to give up the microhouse = "more textured house" position, i will consider myself a success today.

i think you are being unfair saying that i am retreating! i never advanced a "microhouse is more intricate than 99% of other house", dont turn my post into the "opinion of all kompakt fans"! i just prefer techy clanking electronicish sounds rather than live instrument stuff, i dont know anything about music production, nor about dance music, so for all i know 2 unlimited has great "sound design" (wtf is that!?!?!?!!) and is textured. maybe 2 unlimited has the texture of shiny plastic i guess.

i think ronan is pissed cos you have been guilty of twisting what indivual people say to fit your conception of what a whole bunch of people think. like, i dont like italo noises (i dont know what is either) or bleeps or whatever cos i think the alternative is for snobs, i just prefer those sounds! i think you are going to have to deal with this fact that the agenda you ascribe to people is possibly erroneous.

strongo: i did put up a cd i got ages ago, but no one looked at the thread again and the YSI expired. it takes me about 4 hours to upload something so i cant do it tonight. but i will say, bassline isnt as godo as it sounds like it should be. but it does soudn a lot faster than speed garage, although I dont know how fast people played tunes back in 1996/7. and the basslines arent that blepy, but they sure as hell sound a lot more compressed and less well....bassy than old speed garage tunes.

looking at the studiobeatz site, i guess it is basicalyl just speed garage. they dont seem to differentiate.

Davey Boy - Without Your Love - ok so this is a studiobeatz tune. what might make it different. well i dont remember, but i dont associate snare rolls with speed garage, did they used to be in there?

ok some definitive defining factor!!!!!

this naughty nick tune = would speed garage of yore really steal the "born slippy" synth line and jam in it in to a tune? i think bassline is basically more cheesy quaver speed garage. eg "dj stu-e"???????

Vahid the problem is that when I think of deep house I immediately think of the stuff you call "trad house" - 2 out of 3 deep house mixes and club nights that I stumble across will play that NY-Garage-With-Less-Dynamics sound. So if you're upset that people don't realise German house is deep house then this is partly the result of a definitional problem w/r/t what deep house actually is.

As for the artists on the edges, well, who doesn't acknowledge eg. the Theo Parrish/German house connection? e.g. Lawrence is always being compared to Parrish (or was, before he changed his style)! And The Wire have always checked for him, Moodymann etc (prob. due to Detroit lineage).

that said, i can definitely hear a great deal of studio time in the way a lot of vocals sound on deep house records.

US (deep) house producers are really looking for the audience/dancer to complete the equation
This is Important !

(my memory of) new forms sounds way more studio-detailed to me than most techstep.

I don't really buy this distinction between US deep house and the Euro electro/micro stuff. I think the Euro stuff can be just as discursive, and the US stuff just as "this is what this sounds like". I think what differentiates electrohouse and microhouse of the last few years from the old quirky home listening IDM clicks and cuts music is how firmly interwoven it is with its (deep?) house underpinning. Intricate editing can leave a big space for the listener to dance in.

I don't think the deep house similarities are a big secret. But surely you can't underplay basic channel/German techno/European electronic dance & electronic pop influences on the older US house and techno either. I'm sure there's still some great US stuff out there. I think that London Switch type house is pretty fresh, and not at all like that awful big room funky house fodder. But I haven't heard anything that sounds as new and exciting to me at the moment as the Villalobos influenced stuff/Isolee/Booka Shade/Trentemoller/Border Community/Eulberg etc. I remember Simon Reynolds saying that he couldn't imagine the last Villalobos album inspiring a mass movement. If Ketamine house and Dramaminimal really is the music of beach bums and bikini girls on Ibiza, I hope he was wrong! Whereas the Switch stuff for example, as great as it is to my ears, probably sounds too similar to what's been around to really create the trend that the new electro/micro stuff has.

Yeah it was probably a bad example. How about E-Z Rollers vs Optical?

Yes I agree about the differences you are explaining - I think I probably just construe them differently. I'm influenced by how I learnt the terms. My friend "Andre" who introduced me to discursive vs declarative actually used Nile Rodgers 80s production as an example of "declarative" as compared with his "discursive" examples of Nick Launay and C+ C Music Factory, the latter in his opinion being strongly influenced by UK new wave/post punk production (which he favours over US styles.)

a) "so ultra designed the listener need only be a empty vessel passively receiving the signal"

sorry i dont understand why this is a bad thing. If passively receiving the signal means dancing yr butt off, then that sounds fine to me. i wonder sometimes if certain people here actually do any dancing to any of this music!!!!

b) sorry i assumed "sound design" was an established phraseology for talking about production techniques or something. it soudns pretty cool whatever it is.

c) girls and ket house - ancoats, manchester isnt ibiza but lots of fresh faced girls and boys who had been to ibiza, and looked like they had, were abolustely loving villalobos' deep rumbling sexy house at sankeys last weekend. that was funky as fuck too. that reminds, me to the person who asked, villalobos and steve bug played sankeys last friday, michael mayer is playing this friday (14th) at same venue.

d) "awful big room funky house" - why is Funky House awful again? from what ive heard, funky house seems to a more hardcore version of bassline/speed garage, but even less tasteful. i have no idea why it would be compared to any of this music, unless its being used as *gasps* a total strawman shortcut to "bad commercial house that we dont know about and is so inferior to real music like (indie/IDM/deep house/breaks/techno/kompakt)"

so if i can just get people to give up the microhouse = "more textured house" position, i will consider myself a success today.

When did anyone say more textured etc vahid? There is no fallback or retreat position. You keep acting like this debate was started because people actually hate US house and want to argue about it versus electrohouse.

The reality is that actually only you are interested in such a polarised debate, and because of the massive assumptions and constant second guessing of peoples tastes you're making, others have disagreed with you. Then you flip out because they can't somehow empirically prove electrohouse sounds better, when the fact is that was never their intention in the first place, people are just getting pissed off that you somehow expect to be able to prove scientifically that it's worse.

The above idea (that anyone has been saying microhouse is more "textured, intricate, creative" is totally fabricated, from what you want people to say and have silently assumed they are saying for the last I don't know how long.

It comes at a point in the argument where Ambrose made a completely rational and polite post outlining what others have said for the entire thread albeit from his own personal point of view: that some people (who are not idiots with crap taste in music, or dumb newbies) simply prefer electrohouse and don't see the connections you're making.

Once again I'll say I'm amazed you actually think that people will automatically hear the same things as you in a snippet of music. Or that picking a random Speicher and a track off DJ T's album is supposed to represent the entirety of electrohouse.

Furthermore the only reason people say that deep house fans can be snobs is because your entire argument was based on some percieved snobbery among electrohouse fans, it's about the zillionth time this has been pointed out to you aswell. They're simply attempting to give your one sided take on this some perspective. I mean do you actually believe that if, as you suggest, some people have a kneejerk prejudice or dislike for bongos etc, that logic does not absolutely enforce that others will have a kneejerk dislike for italo noises, more electohousey sounds?

So can we just leave this here, this isn't even an argument at this point, it's a bunch of people saying "No well sorry Vahid, actually I like the music I like for reasons other than being a thick fucking moron"

Perhaps: intricate in a way that drew attention to its own intricacy. This is not something that, say, bongo-house usually does, or, maybe it just can't do any longer. I imagine bongo-house in '94 had that same shock-of-the-rhythmic-new as microhouse did in '01, but the bongo loop is so familiar to us now that we take it for granted. (the more broken beaty stuff is a special case - and that's a genre whose very name focuses around how unabashed the rhythm's intricacy can be).

And even that doesn't apply to Kompakt, whose "imaginary dance music" fanbase has its roots in (I suspect) the marketing genius of the second and third (and then the fourth too) Total comps: the combination of the strong label aesthetic with enormous stylistic diversity, and minimal leanings with multiple pop inclinations made German house appear (to the first time observer) like some Mary Poppins bag concealing universes of possibility. It wasn't so much the specific sound of the tracks that made Kompakt into a byword, but the way it seemed to create a short circuit between vinyl-trawling depth and dilettante observer breadth - it's like Total 3 occupied the structural position of a Basic Channel release and a Now That's What I Call Pop-Techno 2001 comp simultaneously.

Acknowleging this, I stillI disagree with Vahid's emperor's new clothes assessment of Kompakt, which has released or at least been connected to an impossible number of tracks that I fucking adore.

Cos that seems to be the thing guys, say, 2 or 3 years older than me are into, if not electro.

As for Cajual/Relief, surely French House came afterwards?

a) "so ultra designed the listener need only be a empty vessel passively receiving the signal"

sorry i dont understand why this is a bad thing. If passively receiving the signal means dancing yr butt off, then that sounds fine to me. i wonder sometimes if certain people here actually do any dancing to any of this music!!!!

well, i am well aware of the irony in my comments (talking about dance music like it's coffee table music) but i was trying to draw a specific distinction between two styles of music. and yes, i dance to this stuff all the time, pretty much every event where there is micro/electro/tech stuff being played i support (now i get to admit that i am experienced), but i will also admit that i definitely spend a lot more time at home either mixing or just listening to tunes. just like everyone else here i'm sure.

b) sorry i assumed "sound design" was an established phraseology for talking about production techniques or something. it soudns pretty cool whatever it is.

it is cool!! and in your pervious post you did a huge wtf so i thought i would explain from my point of view.

i knew i was going to get nailed by someone after spending all of my time previous to that post (and all over ilm) repping for deep german stuff and then criticizing it in one post however hyperbolically. (well telegram sam got me anyway)

anyway, yes, i'm up for fabric whenever everyone is going, it has been a while since i have been, but, really, everyone should go to http://www.lost.co.uk/ instead:) when is the next one though, they dont seem to know:(

in which he tells me i got skooled by ronan

[ronan said ...] "You keep acting like this debate was started because people actually hate US house and want to argue about it versus electrohouse"

Which is to say that you DO find it personally offensive that someone might like Kompakt over, well, basically any House CD with a black guy on the cover of it

yeah ... well ... SO WHAT J?!!?!

all i know is that i listened to r. hide in plain sight this morning during my IKEA-thon, and then when it ended, the disc changer skipped over to famous when dead 2, and since i didn't notice a big stylistic jump (i was busy w/ allen wrenches and particle boards but not THAT busy) i must conclude that either playhouse is a deep house label or romanthony is actually the best minimal electrohouse producer like ever, or that the two genres are actually one and the same.

same thing happened last night moving between a cajual dj mix and "famous when dead one".

The first time I was turned on to Kompakt was at a party where one of my friends was DJing; I was train spotting a Kompakt record and he told me, excitedly, "this is what happened to all that old German trance!!!"

I loved Harthouse.

uhhhh maybe this is a bit of a tangent ... but tanith had his moments in the 2000s, too! check dj rush - "motherfucking bass (tanith remix)", as featured prominently in miss kittin's "on the road" dj mix. maybe this is a comment for the electrohouse thread...

Hi Tobias! Is that the one next to the hostel I was at?

"12. v/a - tribal gathering presents sankey's soap
(jittery and twitchy boompty-not-boompty)"

Ooh! (raises hand, strains to be noticed by teacher) I have this! It is v. good, and the first disc is indeed relevant to our discussion, at least the MFF-ish parts (also it's a good reminder of how "You Can't Hide From Your Bud" is the track that rules house from the center of the universe). It would be a shame, yes, if people into the more actually housey side of German house ignored this stuff. If. (i remain sceptical on this point). Although by the same token I'm always surprised by how unimpressed with MFF Ronan is - at their best they're like Perlon meets Basement Jaxx surely???

There's definitely a split b/w Classic and MFF though I reckon: like, the Classic stuff (excluding latter-day mavericks like Style of Eye), while it has slight hints of the stuttery micro-percussion and weird bleeps and bloops, deliberately backgrounds these hints behind the stomping house beat and other er "classic" house signifiers. Which ties in with my point above about intricacy which draws attention to itself: there is a link b/w Classic and microhouse, but Classic is ambivalent about whether it wants you to notice or not.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd like someone to clarify this for me....

i think this is a very productive ambivalence.

About fucking time (I mean I don't read the mag, just as a...erm view on life and the universe.)

This thread is a fascinating read although I'll have to confess that before it I never ever had heard of Classic or MFF, or even the idea of bongo's in house records as something to be noticed. Which of course makes me one of those whachamacallem? Euro-trendies...so be it. :)

By comparison. Music For Freaks is much closer to a lot of German micro/electrohouse stuff.

Omar, surely you've heard tracks by Freaks? (they = Harris and Solomon = label owners of MFF). You should definitely track down "Where Were You When The Lights Went Out", which is just brilliant, but heaps of their other tracks don't fall far behind. Also anything by Eclaat & Prudo (e.g. "What's Going On In Pisa", "You'll Askus", "California Uber Alles") and Rub's "Who Said That". Euro-trendy reference points would be Markus Nikolai's (still unjustly ignored) Back album and stuff like Matthew Dear's "Dog Days", while when I mention Basement Jaxx I'm thinking of that space between "Breakaway", "Same Old Show" and "Supersonic".

But yeah I checked Discog yesterday and of course I've heard stuff like Eclat & Prudo it's just that I never realized these were the sort of labels-as-concept, labels-as..well...label that you would talk about as we do about you know certain German labels. ;)

I'm must be the only person who loves the Villalobos KLF remix. It's so brooding, erotic but in an irritating way, desire taking over every thought "gonna make you sweat/gonna make you sweat/etc/etc"

Haven't heard the Villalobos KLF mix.

i need to listen to that villalobos KLF remix again. it didn't do anything for me the first time i heard it.

also: hey tobias! why am i awake?! this is bonkers! i'm still on german time!

the villalobos white label mix: i bought it, wasn't at all sold on it when i listened at home, but played it out the other night and it's actually really lovely and effective, perhaps the closest i've heard ricardo's productions come to his own DJing at 10a.m.

harthouse being thrown aside in favor of minimalism, years back - i find this a bit funny, given that alter ego was recording for them back in the day, and also given that, despite the ubiquity of the term "minimal," trance signifiers are all over the place in techno these days.

i heard acid scout's 4 degrees being played out quite a bit in the last year or so, but then i remembered that was disko b and not harthouse, but, bartz is still about isnt he? well, they all are!

oh i didnt realise tobias was that tobias! hello!

hawtin vs vath(!)

funny how things change

what? huh? nooooOOOOOOO! it's an auditory JOURNEY, man, it's an album-length EXPERIENCE, it's a vaguely 4/4 trip into the byroads of 80s boogie and british r&b and underground house. it's a CONCEPT ALBUM, about, uh, sewers and stuff.

There's no reason why we can't both be right on this one.

also the villalobos klf remix sucks rocks

biz pretty much nailed it in an obtuse sort of way, but here's my interpretation:

there are two major themes running through this thread.

(1) vahid vs ronan: an argument about why certain subgenres of house music are popular wherein vahid is trying to convince us all that the recent affection for deep german tech-house is largely a product of hype and trendiness with ronan basically saying that vahid is incorrect, the music is popular and hyped simply because it is good. the flipside of this is probing into why exactly isn't west coast (californian) or deep house as popular as elecrohouse (vahid also admits to having a shameless agenda which is trying to get us all to listen to west coast house) which brings us to...

(2) "deep house": in which usage of the word "deep" is dissected which if you are unaware of specifics in the genre is going to seem strange and nitpicky to say the least. tobias summed it up nicely when he said, "It's pretty easy to talk about records, but it's very difficult to talk about perceptions of records."

consequently a lot of the thread is also about finding the actual songs that tie things together.

and i'm extremely disappointed that although i goaded him into posting huge multiple-paragraph screeds (eye-bulgingly, vein-poppingly, hair-raisingly indignant screeds) that i wasn't able to get ronan to give me a single reason, even a single adjective (ie "see, i like electrohouse record X better than west coast house record Y because the drums in X are more Z than the drums in Y") or value or whatever.

and what's even more disappointing to me is that i wasted half of this thread trying to point out similarities between the two house styles (because i believe villalobos / perlon / MFF / etc are on the verge of bridging the gap) and everyone is sitting around going "no, not similar, nope, don't hear it, yawn, whatever" and then finally tim gets around to saying (paraphrased here) "well yeah, some elements of microhouse are there but they are backgrounded behind the functional 4/4 instead of being the focus of the music..." which was sort of THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT to begin with

i mean i don't know anybody who would say "venetian snares better than dj hype because he foregrounds the amen mashup and discards the functional elements" or "autechre better than mantronix" (for the same reason) or "team shadetek better than timbaland" whereas the exact same thinking seems to go in intellectual internet house music circles ... i am just trying to show that the relationship is there (classic : perlon :: lemon D : photek) and people are wasting a whole lot of energy trying to tell me that it's not.

if you think the divide's not there (ie, if you don't think microhouse is getting to the Zone of Fruitless Intensification on one side, to use a concept i know at least Tim is comfortable with (ever more slap-happy minimal-detail for it's own sake, ie ark and so on) and getting to this sort of comfortable rut of meaningless repeated gestures on the other) then i don't think you're going to understand my reasons for being excited about nu-villalobos and ketamine house (ie, a way out of that rut).

i hear you and i agree that there is a lot of micro in early us house. my musical currency back in the day was mixtapes though. i spent all of my money on going out and never really bought vinyl. thankfully i know djs and had friends that bought a lot of vinyl.

it's true and totally obvious when you think about it -- house has always been a minimal/micro genre, less is less. deep house was actually a way out of minimal i think...at some point in the nineties house also kind of exhausted itself. you can trace this arc through frankie knuckles i think. his output just got deeper and deeper as he went on. he still does this huge once a year party in chicago that is one of the best nights out ever because it's all about the soulful house and it really brings black and white and straight and gay together in a city that is still massively segregated to this day.

i have a few theories. the most obvious is that the ILM dance threads more likely to be popular right now are about stuff that's happening *now*; much of the discussion revolves around new 12"s and what's hot right this minute. i'm thinking of the electro-house bobbins threads, especially, where a lot of people are introducing new tracks, and there's a whiff of excitement about it all. the second theory has to do with age: i'm 25, and i'm guessing that a lot of ILM posters on dance music are around my age. that means i was around 11 or 12 years old in the early '90s, and, well, you do the math. the third theory is that a lot of the people who are really psyched for that nu-villalobos, ketamine-house vibe now were probably into IDM in the '90s, and that a lot of the people who are into the poppier side of kompakt were listening to indie rock and rock-dance crossover stuff before they got into house.

these are huge generalizations, of course, but i think it's at least partly true.

However, I'm not really upset that people don't know about the OG deep house, just as I'm not as up on disco, italo disco and proto house as some people. Classic House and Acid is getting respect because it can be harsh and spare (very 808) and fits really well with DFA dance stuff.

Actually Stu, I'm not really talking about the deeper and deeper and more soulful part of deep house, but actually the more abstract NYC releases (and dub mixes of the main releases) which all work well with the current sound.

The thing is, those records probably have some sonic cues (due to changing technology, fashion etc) that mark them as old or played out etc. I have no problem with that and I think that Kompakt etc just point out that house is healthy and that rumors of it's demise will always be wrong.

why dont i listen to american house? because it doesnt readily fall into the sort of channels of knowledge/distribution that i use (eg ILX hahaha). why dont i search it out? well i guess i feel zonked out already about the surging tide of music in all areas...trying to keep track of whats happening in grime, more and more german stuff etc etc. i dont feel ready to try and access a whole new area, whole new families of labels, of artists, that are well established. the newness of the german scene makes it accessible, makes it ok for newcomers to get into, theres little sense of "be crushed under the weight of predecessors" that i feel with the idea of US house.

i think for me it just feels like something more accessible, less intimidated and less tied down with a certain baggage, i suppose.

well when i say vanguard, i am definitely talking sonics and newness over anything else. at the love parade sf the drum and bass stage and the om records stage were very conveniently located right next to each other. i spent more time with om for sure. the most insane crowd and response though was for the trance stage. holy shit...

okay i have been on this thread all f-ing day! i have to go be responsible now.

Yes. But it gets confusing are we talking about American Kompakt fans who crave a euro-fantasy or Kompakt fans in general?

I've been trying to write a post and I just can't get it right. But it boils down to this. Deep house always has been a closed off scene (and now I'm talking specifically Holland but this probably means the same for the rest of Europe.) And it has to do with what Jess was hinting at it above: R&B and homosexuality.

And I don't know how it is with other generations of clubbers but at the time I was getting into house (1991) a very important idea was: "thank God, we've been liberated from the Song." Deep house for ravers like me always felt like something of a betrayal: we've got the hooversounds now, no need for proper singing thank you very much (of course I'm not talking about say Steve Pointdexter going "work that motherfucker/work that motherfucker".)

It's a bit of hypothesis but I have a feeling Deep house over the years has found a different audience here. An overlap with the clubbing audience that likes latin music, world music...erm..."real music". It's almost completly seperated from say the rest of house (or house related music, techno, whatever).

and i'm extremely disappointed that although i goaded him into posting huge multiple-paragraph screeds (eye-bulgingly, vein-poppingly, hair-raisingly indignant screeds) that i wasn't able to get ronan to give me a single reason, even a single adjective (ie "see, i like electrohouse record X better than west coast house record Y because the drums in X are more Z than the drums in Y") or value or whatever.

I'm happy to tackle this one.

First: a disclaimer. I'm 28. I spent most of the 90s listening, djing and collecting various forms of "deep" house, from Cajual/Relief tracks to New Jersey garage to West Coast psychedelia. My favourite DJs at the time would have been people like Paul 'Trouble' or Jeno or Derrick Carter. So anyone accusing me of being a germany house trendy can expected to be crushed beneath a large stack of Kerri Chandler test pressings.

These days I would nearly always vastly prefer to listen and dance to (for want of a better word) micro- and electro- house in all their myriad forms than US deep house. And those are primarily intrinsic reasons (with some extrinsic signifiers).

The first reason is that I like dance music with a level of sinuousity to the sound. In electrohouse you get that through undulating basslines and a level of breakiness in some of the beats. In the german stuff it comes from the old-school new jersey garage snare patterns (albeit executed with clicks and squiggles instead of hats and snares). In either case the end result is a groove that you can get inside and bounce around freely to - like older jungle - you're not nailed into a four-square foot-to-foot stomping. It's got a shoulder shake and a capacity for free-form improvisation.

This is a quality I find utterly lacking in most 'deep' house made after about 1999. 2 step garage robbed it of these elements, and in seeking to go the other way it lost all of that spontaneity. Yes, some acts like Swag and Freaks try very hard to regain the fluidity but to me, they fall flat. In general it's all just too tasteful. They took the sex out of it and just left the 'intelligence' and the fucking awful fake jazz signifiers.

Admittedly the direction german house has taken these days - the Eulberg sound - is also losing a lot of that sinuousity. But the defence it has is that it was never sexy to begin with. The fluidity comes from a different source, some evocation of dancing almost without the sexual elements (cos it's impossible to remove them completely) but with the understanding of how the human body moves that sexy dance music usuallyhas. This is doubly true of electrohouse.

The second big reason is surprise. Deep house doesn't have any surprises left for me. I've been listening to it too long, I guess, but I just feel I always know what's coming next. However the newer styles have opened up a whole new palette of sonic tricks. And hearing a completely unexpected sound coming out of the speaker at you at 3am will always be one of those things that makes clubbing worth doing.

Finally, and this is far more of an extrinsic factor, there is a raw excitement to electro and micro sounds (admittedly diminishing this year). They sound illegal, druggy and woozy. Like a gateway to another world of sexy nightlife that never ends.

Deep house on the other hand is the sound of trendy bars with wrought-iron furniture and recessed primary coloured lighting while young professionals sip the cocktail du jour. It serves as a depressing reminder of mundanity, not an escape.

And I'd make the opposite point to Tylero - I actually find it fantastic when a piece of trad house is dropped into a micro set. Like Steve Bug using Sharon Pass' "The word is love" or one of my favourites - mixing Robag Wruhme into Stacy Kidd's "Thank you". Hearing the bongos from "What a sensation" creeping over the top of some Villalobos composition. All these are fantastic and exciting and remind me (and other people I've seen reacting to 'em) about what was so great about US house in the 90s. But I'm buggered if I want to hear it played for 5 hours. I'd rather hear the 70s disco it's all nicked from in the first place...

I think this characterisation of the debate is stretching it Vahid. As many people have pointed out, there has always been a micro element to house - especially early NY stuff a la Strictly Rhythm, which I should point out that I love and have been talking up a privately forecasted revival of for over a year now. Classic definitely situates itself in that mould and attempts to intensify it somewhat, but that does not mean that it provides the same thrill as all the German stuff - and even then the protomicrohouse tracks you posted on that thread a while back weren't nearly as micro as the more micro-ish Classic tracks!

If you had limited your claim to just Classic and MFF, I don't think anyone would really have had a problem - I certainly wouldn't. Uno Records is less micro than those labels but I had no hesitation throwing around the term "micro-garage" when I hyped their mix. But Classic and MFF (or Uno Records) do not equal "deep house".

That's why I think people upthread were skeptical when you implied that any difference between German house and deep house (which does not all sound like Classic, and certainly doesn't sound like MFF) was a mirage fostered by graphic designers.

If you're arguing "German house is different to the house I like, and for many of the reasons that people actually cite, but I don't like those differences", that's another issue altogether (see below for more on this angle).

"i mean i don't know anybody who would say "venetian snares better than dj hype because he foregrounds the amen mashup and discards the functional elements"

Who said "better than"? But actually there are heaps of people who like venetian snares because they are so fucked-up, such music doesn't need to be objectively superior to jungle in order to provide an interesting point of distinction. If such points of distinction aren't allowed, why bother with any house that isn't a bare four-to-the-floor kickdrum? The question is, "does the point of distinction work: is this music counter-productive in its complexity?" And there's an argument there, but it doesn't warrant shaming people on the grounds that they're simply following hype and don't listen to music with their own ears.

"team shadetek better than timbaland" whereas the exact same thinking seems to go in intellectual internet house music circles."

Well actually don't heaps of people think Timbaland is/was better than, say, Trackmasters because his grooves are less generic, more obviously syncopated and so on and so forth. I love a lot of Trackmasters' productions and have defended them all over ILM but that doesn't mean that I advocate a policy of suspicion toward any producer (e.g. Timbaland) who takes things in a bit more of a complex direction. I've certainly talked more about Timbaland than Trackmasters on ILM and my blog, not because I think Timbaland is automatically and inherently better due to his avant-ness, but because I like the way the different components of his grooves come together. I don't see why the same can't apply vis a vis Classic and German house.

"if you think the divide's not there (ie, if you don't think microhouse is getting to the Zone of Fruitless Intensification on one side, to use a concept i know at least Tim is comfortable with (ever more slap-happy minimal-detail for it's own sake, ie ark and so on) and getting to this sort of comfortable rut of meaningless repeated gestures on the other)"

More "interested in" than "comfortable with", and I don't think ZFIs operate consistently anyway. I mean, I could just as easily say that Deep House is one big ZFI by fruitlessly intensifying the "deepness" already present in house, but just because I can make the argument that doesn't mean it's true! It's an interesting way of thinking about the issue, but it can also a dubious pseudo-scientific manouevre for justifying anything you perceive to be a "step too far" in any particular genre. You have to make the case for it rather than merely invoke it.

I think the point of the complexity/functionalism balance is that it's more of an empirical rather than ethical issue. I don't think you can just import a bellcurve model onto any style (with simplicity and complexity at either end) and expect to be able to confidently rubbish anything that doesn't fall in the center. Sometimes astonishing complexity works, sometimes astonishing simplicity works, sometimes a mixture of both works, and each of these will work according to a slightly (or radically) different logic. So the question then becomes: does the track live up to its own logic? Does it exploit the possibility opened up by its sonic approach?

When it comes to jungle, I have been concerned to point out that, in jungle's "golden age", complexity wasn't the only name of the game. BUT that doesn't mean that most of my absolutely favourite jungle tracks aren't mindbogglingly complex. If someone told me that they liked drill and bass more than jungle because it was more complex, I'd be keen to point those tracks out to them. If they then said that they didn't like any of those tracks, I might suggest that it was something else about drill & bass that they felt marked it out as better than jungle, and I would suggest that it was the fact that drill & bass more fully departed from a dancefloor logic.

But I wouldn't assume all of this if the comparison was between Squarepusher and "Brown Paper Bag" - especially if I gave them Dillinja's "The Angels Fell" or DJ Hype's "R-r-roll the Beats" and they liked those. It would be unfair to assume this because "Brown Paper Bag", despite being a good and detailed jungle track, simply isn't as complex as either "The Angels Fell" or Squarepusher, so I can't prove my assertion. At this stage, I might switch my argument and say that, while Squarepusher was more complex, he was an example of ZFI - BUT this would contradict my first argument, that there was no difference in complexity b/w Squarepusher and Dillnja/DJ Hype, which, if true, would mean that Dillinja/DJ Hype were also an example of ZFI.

The case is similar here: either German house is an example of ZFI, in which case so is MFF, and both should equally be rejected. Or German House is the same as MFF in terms of intensification, in which case some of the people on this thread prefer the former for other reasons. Which one is it Vahid?

Now a couple of things to note that complicate: firstly, the dancefloorishness of German house is clearly made out by its huge following in clubs and success among mainstream clubbers, which drill & bass never had even merely in relation to dancefloor jungle. Secondly, a lot of German house is really very very simple indeed - see a lot of electro-house - and the only label that might arguably fall into a ZFI-zone along the lines you suggest are Perlon, who you always check for!

So from that we can tentatively conclude two things: a) that German house isn't unanimously or even predominantly characterised by a move away from the dancefloor; and b) that it's not actually the ZFI-qualities of the music that you object to.

All of which makes me think that ZFI is one big red herring in this argument!

The song itself kicks way ass by the way...

Vahid why should I like what I like in direct comparison to genres of your choosing?

If you want to see why I like electrohouse I'm pretty sure I've started loads of threads about records.

This does not mean, Firm, Get Physical, etc sound like Deep House, to retread the argument ONCE AGAIN, why the hell should your examples of electrohouse be considered reliable representatives by anyone else?

My post may have been eye popping/indignant/whatever, but you're still ploughing the same furrow and have completely ignored its main point: what a royal ass you are being on this thread.

Electro-house on the other hand is the sound of half assed clubs with repurposed Ikea furniture and no lighting at all while young state-assisted dropouts sniff what passes for cocaine these days. It serves as a depressing reminder of mundanity, not an escape

I mean, this is your context-dependent view and it shouldn't be generalized ! I also vehemently disagree with that "house sucks since 99" idea. Most house producers who were already working then (and still are) never worried about UK garage or whatever and still push the musical envelope, as someone who understood "trad" house you cannot deny it - if you bother to search these records out.

i like dingy badly lit warehouses more though. especially if they are playing millsian techno instead of this house rubbish;)

I'd say it's become more of an argument split in the deep house vs. electro and/or micro house arena.

I live in LA and I've definitely swung towards backing the arguments made by the electro/micro house camp, simply because they're stating what I believe- all these genres have value, but prefering one over another doesn't mean you have bad taste or like your music for all the wrong reasons- it's simply a matter of what is exciting you the most at the moment, and electro and micro house is what is presently fresh and exciting.

Jacob's statement a few posts upthread is so OTM, everyone needs to read it again. Hands down one of the best posts on this thread. Tim's ZFI post immediately following is also totally on point.

This is also a good time to point out that access to all this music in the US is marginal in comparison to the UK and Europe. Of course we've had our day, and some cities are still doing great nights and pull big DJs, but again- marginal. In LA, you go to a "house" club, you get Thievery Corporation, you go to any club with the word "electro" in it, you get Ladytron.

i like trendy bars too, but i'll take a warehouse party over one any day.

i agree with the comments jacob makes about sinunosity and room for the shoulders. "i feel space"...

hmmm ... well, jacob, i am just really really skeptical about this sort of argument, mainly because i've heard this thing said about any number of genres and it's just the same sort of generic music snob language that gets passed around internet music forums endlessly.

same thing with jsoulja's comments - all this is saying to me is "we are white negroes, we care about sex and drugs and illegal attitude and have huge record collections that are more relevant than ladytron and i know how to swing freely and i understand my body and if you disagree you must not either"

it goes w/out saying that that is mainly because i still have no trouble free-form improvising and swinging and bouncing around inside the grooves of a recent lance desardi or derrick carter mix. i just can't relate to those sorts of comments, still too ad hoc, etc.

i would say the 2nd, and that's what i've been getting at all along, and i would include most other current deep discotechhouse labels (classic, 20:20 vision, lowdown, slip'n'slide, prescription, all the dozens of tiny lowprofile independents like stompaphunk and fiat lux and brique rouge and safari electronique and so on that constantly do my head in) in that formulation, too.

-- Ronan (ronan.fitzgerald6NOSPA...), October 13th, 2005 2:14 AM. (Ronan)

um. OK ronan, please tell me why the 1st single off DJ T's album shouldn't be representative of the get physical sound? should i have picked a chelonis single? should i have picked "philly"? would that have dis-proved my point?

Where is "here"?

LA gets visiting dance DJs every few weeks or so, but there's nothing regular at all in terms of house/techno clubs. I brought this up because I've been to all the so-called clubs in LA that boast a dance music night with some form of applicable DJ, and I still have yet to hear a single Playhouse or Kompakt or Perlon track played out ONCE in this city (with the exception of the one-off DJs mentioned below).

I saw Woody McBride, Damian Lazarus, and John Tejada over the summer, but all were spinning in very small venues to very small crowds.

Ellen Allien spun some Native Instruments promo event a week ago and I was told it was on a back patio with about 50 chin-scratcher types standing around.

San Francisco seems to be a far superior California city for dance music. LA is all about "rock". The only reason the dance end of electro-clash took off here is because it gave everyone an excuse to dress like Poison....

Which would be fine to say, Vahid, if what I was saying was "Michael Mayer is God and Derrick Carter sucks because he is black, but you know I also like Derrick Carter, so this kind of argument has no value.

t raumschmiere is rock n roll techno if there ever was.

Right- visiting DJ, though.

T.Raumschmiere plays here all the time

Um, I'll dare to say that's because LA is one of the only cities that cares about this guy, and that interest still exists solely because he took the extra step of putting a trucker hat on the skull logo of his latest album cover, therefore validating an obviously foolish trend that took off like wild-fire out here.....

That said- if you like the KCRW world-beat-tronica sound, there's plenty of places to go....

There's a pretty thriving underground breaks/house/etc scene, if you're into that sort of thing and you don't mind a Burning Man vibe. Do Lab parties downtown, outdoor parties just north of Pasadena, etc. (I have friends that attend these things religiously, I've had fun at some of em, some of them have been eh.)

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

With Superpitcher in SF tomorrow night, that'll make 3 biggies to skip LA recently, if you also count Isolee and Hawtin (unless they were both here and I missed it)....

advance tix available?

found the show buried in "The Fold" ad in the new LA Weekly

Okay, well let's stick to this argument and drop the ZFI one. Now, what can we agree on here? Seems fairly straightforward:

1) micro- & electro-house share a lot of elements with other "deep discotechhouse labels", who don't seem to rate as much of a mention amongst fans of the former (and the reverse is also true).

2) this is for several reasons:

a) issues of articulated aesthetic, patronage and proximity: many of the artists lauded in the microhouse/electro-house continuum are German, release their material on record labels which consciously hold themselves out as belonging to this particular and recent continuum (e.g. Crosstown Rebels), or are repped for by DJs also holding themselves out in this fashion, whereas the undervalued labels tend to belong to a lineage of deep house and tech-house, and belong to circles of patronage associated with this lineage.

b) some sonic differences: although the underrated labels often stray into microhouse/electro-house territory, their output usually reflects their lineage/patronage more strongly, and there are some differences in the sonic signifiers each use.

3) So we conclude that the sense of a division between the two groups occurs due to a mixture of the above - generational/tribal, and sonic.

4) The collapse of one barrier almost always entails at least the partial collapse of the other: if the sonic difference is eliminated the generational/tribal division is also weakened substantially, such that the label/artist in question can float between the two groups - instructive examples here being MFF (vis a vis US house) and Border Community (vis a vis prog) for labels. In the opposite direction, artists like Jeff Bennett, despite belonging to a German house label, will be played more readily by purveyors of deep house/tech house (and have some tracks released on their labels) due to the absence of a meaningful sonic difference.

5) It is difficult to say which barrier is more determinative: artists such as Trentemoller or Tiefschwarz appear to change label/scene affiliations simultaneously to changing their sonic approach. Perhaps the weakening of each barrier acts upon the other. However, it is rarer for an artist to simply swap groups of allegiance without taking on some of the new scene's sonic signifiers at all, than it is for an artist to take on the other scene's ideas while remaining in their original group of allegiance.

6) Since many dance fans tend to favour particular scenes, it is unsurprising that they will pay more attention to artists/labels which fall within the perimeters of that scene either because they have always been members of that scene or because they "pass over" in the manner described above. However, once an artist/label "passes over", their overall output may come under closer scrutiny even if they remain partially separated from the scene in question.

7) Due to the fact that there are two distinct (however interlinked) logics at work (generational/tribal and sonic), and the scenes (and the relationships between them are historically mutable), some apparent inconsistencies can arise: artists with very similar sonic approaches may be regarded inconsistently by one or both scenes.

8) In such an instance it is worthwhile drawing said fans' attention to the existence of this sonic/status inconsistency. However, this incosistency does not in itself undermine the overall logic which keeps the two scenes separate, and is more likely to simply result in another crossover.

9) If enough artists and labels crossed over, it is entirely possible for the two scenes to collapse into one another. However this entails not only a profusion of sonic similarities, but a disappearance (or vast reduction in importance) of the sonic differences which anchor each scene.

10) Some people in each scene may resent the other scene, and point out that their music does the "same" thing as the other scene, only "better", which generally means "different" - the sonic difference which anchor their scene as separate). Thus this argument has a level of (occasionally productive) contradiction, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing the difference between the two scenes. As a result, such claims are more political than they are diagnostic: the implied potential synthesis between the two scenes involves the difference in the speaker's scene overruling the difference in the other scene - i.e. one scene cannibalises the other.

11) Each scene will articulate itself and the other in different terms, and see the difference between themselves differently. As a result there can be no "middle ground" position.

i think a bit of "kill your idols" is good for any genre. discussions like these are proof that there is still life in house and regardless of which tribe is on top there is still some mutual reinforcement going on.

Not to pick at your dissertation, Tim, because I really want to address you as Yoda following that last post, but could you perhaps provide some examples for clarity? I was trying to think of some, and the only thing that came to mind via this thread was Isolee, because he's repped on both Playground and Classic, though I think he still holds respect with fans of both labels......

Isolee is a good example actually - what Isolee means to the two groups might be different b/c one group might think of "Beau Mot Page" as microhouse and the other as vaguely balearic dubby deep house.

When I wrote that I was actually thinking more of 2 acts who sound similar having different status with each scene: e.g. Vahid's complaints that DJ T doesn't sound that different to US stuff to him (the fact that others would consider them obviously distinguishable demonstrates that we can't necessary agree on which 'differences' are salient). To run with that example, the first DJ T track I heard was "Philly" on Naked Music's Lost On Arrival comp: probably the best track on that release, but very much a classic (post-Metro Area) dub-inflected US house track - and in terms of tracking new trends in music probably unremarkably so (though I love it to bits). So yeah, you can make the case that, if someone loves "Philly" but doesn't like Naked Music, there's an arbitrariness there which seems irrational or misguided.

The thing is, DJ T releases his stuff on Get Physical and also makes acidy electro tracks like "Phantomas", "Electrofied" and "Time Out (Acid Dub)" - so when someone says they love DJ T (including "Philly")they are saying they love a spectrum of house that stars with "Philly" and ends up in quite hard/acidy territory.

Whereas Lost on Arrival is perhaps the hardest that Naked Music gets, so its spectrum, while contiguous to the Get Physical spectrum, goes in the other direction. "Philly" is an overlap point for both scenes, but it means something quite different to each (soft and lush for one scene, driving and intense for the other). Which is the same thing as you get with "Beau Mot Plage".

Of course, Vahid's beef is probably with regard to tracks that could fill this role quite easily except for the fact that one scene never finds out about them for one reason or another. Of course a big part of this is simply obscurity: the majority of DJs are unlikely to pick up on a track from another scene unless it's shoved under their noses.

In the 90s European house was very definitely persona non grata for deep house DJs with the possible exception of stuff like Paper, Pagan or DiY (and actually DiY had some of the most obviously proto-microhouse releases - stuff like Brooks and Nail). Having said that, I only ever heard those records played by US-oriented UK djs like Ralph Lawson, and rarely by Carter, Farina et al.

On the other hand the german crew would definitely have 'grown up' on US releases - just look to how much Mayer cites DJ Pierre and Wild Pitch as precursors to the Kompakt sound. I think german house has internalised US deep house to an extent, whereas US producers have come very late to the party in terms of integrating the sounds from the EU into their tracks (Kerri Chandler's "Bar a thym" as case in point - as a 'scene' record it could have been made 3-4 years ago - it's effective, but hardly innovative).

Wild Pitch is a really interesting sound to look at with respect to this debate because it pulled off that deep yet trancey trick a decade before, and a lot of the overtly wild pitch producers e.g. Dannell Dixon sound a lot like they could have been on Kompakt (if they'd had crisper drums).

Not really sure how it fits into the thesis but the biggest thing I notice as a difference between german and US house these days is the kick drum sound. Areal in particular uses these really tight, compressed sounding kicks with a really sharp attack and decay, whereas the US sound is fuzzier and more organic sounding, with a more obviously bassy resonance to it. Basically, still that chicago house kick sound.

partisan silliness.

-- vahid (vfoz...), October 13th, 2005. (later)

Well Vahid, if you're going to argue about why other people like electrohouse, then I'm not sure you telling them what the electrohouse that is best representative of their alleged prejudice is is the best way to do that.

The sound of Get Physical stopped being DJ T a long time ago, perhaps a year or more ago? In any case he's unashamedly retro, as I've said before this thread began.

The point is of course you can find some examples of where electrohouse is similar to US deep house, but you can also find plenty where it's not. As I said earlier, when there are hundreds of records being released you can pretty much make any connections you want.

Anyway I'm not particularly sure what the point of this prove yourself crap is so I'd rather not continue it, not least since while asking me to say why record x is better than US Deep House record y, you've not once attempted to do the reverse, apart from by slamming the fans of one side.

I think this whole area is kind of silly, anyhow, because let's face it, it can be difficult to say why you like one record in the same genre, by the same producer, with similar noises, and not another, let alone two from totally different genres.

An area I do find interesting in this conversation is the fact that nobody, on either side, has mentioned or suggested just how influenced (and to me it seems massive and obvious) by Cajual/Relief Michael Mayer's DJ sets are. Not Fabric 13, but many of the live sets, sometimes I think he actually rejects tracks if they don't have those huge wet snares.

They are all Euro tracks for sure but there is that Chicago feel to alot of them.

I mean, does Vahid accept that there is a side of electrohouse which has very little to in common with US house, at all?

And if not then why shouldn't US House DJs be playing "Mandarine Girl", "Piccadilly Circuits", "Body Language"?

I don't think they should, personally, cos it smacks of some massive assimilation excercise, but I don't see why if it's all one gigantic house scene that this means it's only Europe which is ignorant and concentrating on itself.

And having just typed that you have to laugh out loud at how ridiculous the idea of evil bully Europe taking over America is.

i think what's interesting that hasn't been discussed yet is how a lot of the recent european house which we have been discussing here sounds like it is really based around the idea of a song rather than a track. this is something i got initially from listening to mayer mix. quite often he lets the tracks just play out and it just sounds right whereas with a lot of traditional house if you did this, it might not be a boring mix, but it wouldn't be a very engaging one either. (superpitcher's today is also a really good example of this) i think "going back to the song" is a very rootsy and deep thing to do, arguably it is something techno/tech-house needed. i remember reading a mayer interview where he said something along the lines of having respect for the song. i suppose this is tangentially related to the new york axis of house too.

so do you guys hear this? thoughts?

i would say that there is the song-y side represented by labels like kompakt and get physical, the middle ground occupied by artists like luciano, and then the more traditional style of mixing done by hawtin and villalobos and the style of tracks they play. in hawtin's case he is also using ultra-modern tools, but i hear a lot of history in his sets. hawtin is also pretty far away from deep house...

Wouldn't this also have something to do with the emergence of electro-house, a good bulk of which is very song-structured? I definitely see this in Kompakt releases (warning- you're apt to drum up the "yeah but that's because Mayer CAN'T mix" argument), but I'm also seeing it on other European house labels (Famous When Dead IV is chock full of examples) and all over the electro-house 12" spectrum. Another point of reference: quite a few of the Fabric mixes.

that was the one i did. see here for reference:

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0509/050302_music_jukebox.php

i think he's a great dj, by the way. he seems to play a different kind of set in germany than he does in the states. in germany it's a much more tracky, more dubby feel, less song-oriented.

i think he's a fantastic dj...a real connoisseur.

jsoulja, i agree and the list is numerous: tiefschwarz, ivan smagghe, "rocker", etc, etc. i wouldn't call "rocker" deep though!!

haha, they are all writing pop songs!!

I really liked the earlier Naked Music comps no matter how uncool they were/are.

I don't think it should be cherished. I think it's the inevitable focus of a conversation pitting deep house against German (micro/electro) house.. because it's the stuff that ends up being thought about in different ways

A good deal of the stuff I've been really getting into this year is actually at the far end of the deep house/electro-house continuum - Eulberg, Alex Smoke, Sender Records... the stuff with almost no trace of house in it at all. But even if a house fan dislikes this stuff they probably wouldn't argue with an enthusiast about its logic - they just don't like that logic. Whereas if we were having a discussion about where electro-house stops and techno begins, suddenly Eulberg would become much more interesting, a point of potentially antagonistic tension.

Sound of collapsing glass houses.

I mean it's fun to argue and all, but I do hope Vahid isn't taking this entirely seriously!

(without having heard any of the releases) i suspect that mayer's immer imprint will make some of the connections seem obvious.

http://3voor12.vpro.nl/3voor12/player/audio.jsp?audionumber=21296516